Receive Notifications

You can set up notifications within Find My to provide a variety of information depending on the category:

• People: You can opt to receive alerts when they arrive and leave locations you define, or send them alerts based on your location.

• Devices and Items: You can be notified when a device is found if marked as lost. You can also receive a prompt when you leave something behind.

Let’s start with people.

Notifications for People

People-based notifications let you track when someone (including you) arrives at or leaves a location. The alert can be set once or on a recurring basis.

Here’s how to create a notification for a person in iOS/iPadOS or macOS:

1. In a native Find My app, bring up the action sheet for a person via the Person view.

2. Tap or click Add.

3. Select Notify Me or Notify Person.

4. For you or someone else, you can select Person/I Arrives and Person/I Leaves; for someone else, you can select Person Is Not At.

5. Pick a location. Some locations will be prefilled, such as you or another person’s current location (Figure 44). You can also tap or click New Location and drag a map or enter a location. Clicking or tapping in the search field brings up potential matches from the person’s contact card before you start typing.

   

6. Optionally set a radius. You can tap Small, Medium, or Large at the bottom of the map to switch among radii of 300, 800, and 1300 feet (90 m, 240 m, and 400 m). Or you drag the blue dot at the right out to a preferred distance; a label indicates the radius as you drag. The minimum distance is a 300-foot (90 m) radius (Figure 45). This can prevent excessive notifications by setting a wider area for departures or allow earlier notification for you or someone arriving.

   

7. Your final option varies based on the Arrives/Leaves/Is Not At selection:

   • For yourself or someone else, Arrives/Leaves lets you pick Only Once or Every Time for notification frequency.

   • For another person with Person Is Not At chosen, you can set a range of time and days of the week (Figure 46).

   

8. Click or tap Add to complete. If you set this up to track someone else, they now receive a notification that you’ve done so.

When you let other people know what you’re up to with notifications, they receive an alert that tells them what they can expect to receive. This appears across your devices and is an anti-stalking measure as I describe in Unwanted Tracking of a Person.

If you want to see notifications about someone else’s comings and goings, you’re both told what they will be informed of and given a chance to, and they receive a notification about what you’ll be updated about (Figure 47).

For recurring alerts set to Every Time, you’re told that someone has to approve the action (Figure 48). The notification is slightly different for Person Is Not At recurring alerts, specifying the first time the schedule will go into effect (Figure 49).

For notifications that require permission, you see in that person’s action sheet a Pending Request label (Figure 50).

It can be useful to pause notifications for a lot of reasons; tap or click Pause to pick a time to resume (Figure 51).

Notifications for Devices and Items

Device notifications don’t let you see when something comes or goes, but instead provide you useful feedback related to losing something or having it stolen.

Notify When Found

For many releases of Apple’s operating systems, Find My has offered a notification feature tied to its Mark as Lost/Lost Mode options (see Finding a Lost Device). Because you can mark something missing when it’s not connected to the internet, a notification when it returns online—however briefly—is a big help.

Notify When Found is disabled in the action sheet for a device or item in a native Find My app unless it’s been marked as lost. Then you have just the option to turn it on or off. If enabled, a notification will appear on your devices when either one of your pieces of equipment detects the missing item, or it reports its location through Find My Device or the Find My network.

Notify When Left Behind

Notify When Left Behind helps with absent-mindedness, exhaustion, and theft. Using your presence, as described in Share Your Location and See Others’ Locations, whenever you move a certain distance away from a device or item—Apple doesn’t define how far—you receive a notification on that device (Figure 52).

Found on the action sheet for any device or item in native Find My apps, it’s enabled by default under Notifications. You can choose to disable it on a per-item basis. Apple also excludes the place you defined as Home or Apple inferred was your Home. (See Significant Locations Are Kept Private.)

Notify When Left Behind helps in a bunch of scenarios I can imagine:

• Leaving an iPhone, iPad, or Mac in a coffee shop or restaurant.

• Forgetting your backpack that has an AirTag in its pocket at someone’s house.

• Checking your luggage at an airport or train station for a trip.

  

• Leaving items at a hotel room, hostel, AirBnb, or the like after checking in during a trip.

• Not packing your laptop in a bag you’re carrying with you before leaving for school or work—or vice versa!

• Locking up a bike that you’ve attached a Find My item to at your destination—then forgetting you biked there and taking a bus home. (Folks, if you bike regularly and you haven’t made or almost made this mistake, count yourself lucky.)

• Forgetting you placed an iPad in the seat-back pocket on an airplane. (This has got to be one of the pre-pandemic main causes of loss for iPads and Kindles.)

When you’re notified, as in Figure 52, you can tap Don’t Notify Me and the location at which your Find My item or device was left will be added as a location. If you have an Apple Watch, a notification on the watch also lets you tap Trust Location or Dismiss.

You can also suppress this notification in a Find My app in iOS/iPadOS or macOS by selecting the item or device, which reveals where it was left. You can tap or click Don’t Notify Me Here.

When you add a location through this method, the operating system prompts you “Don’t notify at map description of location?” (Figure 53) You can then tap or click “For all Items or Devices,” “For this Item/Device,” or Cancel.

You can also add other locations to exclude manually by tapping or clicking Notify When Left Behind and then New Location. The map interface for location selection is identical to that for People as shown in Notifications for People.

You have the additional option when you click Done to add the location to select “For all Items and Devices” or “For this Device.”

You can remove almost any location in iOS/iPadOS or macOS by tapping or clicking the remove button to its right. The exception is the Home location, which can be removed only on the device that establishes presence. You can view those locations in watchOS, but not remove them.

Play Sound

You can tap or click Play Sound when you can’t find a device or item but think it may be nearby, or for a device when you’re trying to alert someone remotely to notice that it’s there—and potentially get in touch with you. This includes everything from iPhones to earbuds to AirTags.

After you tap or click Play Sound, a loud pinging noise will play on a device (if sound is active) or the device will vibrate (if muted) for two minutes. You can also tap to stop it sooner.

With an AirTag, the sound has a more friendly tone and lasts for about 10 seconds. Other Find My items vary in the sound they produce: the Chipolo ONE Spot says it blares at up to 120 decibels during a sound pattern it makes—the range of a chainsaw or plane taking off.

Play Sound communicates differently with devices and items:

• For an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch, the signal is sent via a local network or the internet.

• AirTags, Find My items, all AirPods models, and Beats audio devices with Find My support have to be in Bluetooth range to receive the signal from a paired device. (This is true even for Apple and Beats audio devices that can be tracked via the Find My network.)

• AirPods Pro (2nd generation) can play a sound on their charging case as well as through earbuds.

For audio hardware, you should receive a warning about the potential for hearing damage (Figure 55).

With Apple and Beats earbuds, you can typically pick which earbud should play a sound: either or both (Figure 56).

If a device is unlocked, a notification appears that reads “Find My Device Alert” (Figure 57). If an iPhone or iPad is locked, it has to be unlocked to disable the ping or vibration. On a Mac, the dialog can be dismissed at a login screen.

Pull Up Driving Directions

You can get directions to someone or something by tapping Directions in People, Devices (including the Find Devices web app), and Items, or the time estimate (blue button) in iOS 17/iPadOS 17 or Sonoma in Messages while viewing a person’s information card. The operating system opens the Maps app in Directions mode with the device or item’s current location or last-known location as the destination.

This is a pretty straightforward use: you want to get to where someone or something is, and this gives you the path to it.

But there’s a way to invert it that can be extremely useful, too, though it requires a few steps. When certain relatives visit us with their families or when we’re trying to figure out when our kids are due home, my spouse and I use Directions like this:

1. In Family Sharing, select the person or device associated with them.

2. Bring up the actions sheet and tap Directions.

3. In Maps in iOS/iPadOS or macOS (but not watchOS), reverse the direction:

   In macOS, tap the reverse direction button.

   In iOS or iPadOS, tap the My Location link under the To location name text and then tap the reverse direction button.

4. Select the mode of transportation the person is using.

Now you have the approximate time someone will arrive. While you can use the more direct method described earlier in Receive Notifications, this is a quick method less reliant on the accuracy and notification delivery of Find My and Apple.