Samsung Adds An Apple-Inspired ‘Offline Finding’ Feature To The Find My Mobile App That Allows Users To Locate Their Galaxy Smartphones Even When The Device Is Offline

Losing your smartphone can be a nightmare for you, however, there are some tools to help recover your lost smartphone. Samsung has designed the Find My Mobile application for Galaxy smartphones to help you remotely locate your smartphone, back up your data to Samsung cloud, block access to Samsung Pay in case of theft. You can also delete local data using this application. But the Find My Mobile application requires a working network connection to perform all of those connections. So, if your smartphone loses network coverage, there is no other way to locate your mobile using this application.

To address this issue, Samsung is rolling out a new update for the app which is designed to track down a lost smartphone even if it is not connected to the internet. Called the Offline finding option, it was first spotted by Max Weinbach of XDA Developers, and the company has starting rolling out the feature to users over the past few days. The new feature arrives in version 7.1.08.0 of Find My Mobile and the new feature is not enabled by default. Once users have installed the latest version of the app, they will receive a notification asking if they would like to enable the Offline finding feature.

It is noteworthy that the new feature can also locate smartwatches and earbuds if these devices were last connected to the mobile that will be locating them. It will also allow you to use your smartphone to locate lost Galaxy smartphones that may be nearby. The feature also allows you to encrypt your offline location. The feature works by making other Samsung Galaxy devices with offline finding able to scan other Galaxy smartphones nearby and report their location. It is not yet clear whether the feature will be made available to all Samsung smartphones and how it works.

According to XDA Developers, the feature is currently available to users only in the United States and South Korea. Users can download the Find My Mobile app from Samsung Galaxy Store. Users who have experimented with the feature claims that the Offline finding feature works pretty well. The feature sounds pretty similar to the Offline Finding feature of Apple’s Find My iPhone app. Apple rolled the feature with iOS 13. You can activate Offline finding for iOS devices through your Apple ID in Settings, where enabling the Find My option will bring up the option to enable the functionality.


Screenshot: MaxWinebach

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