iPhone Findable After Power Off

Your iPhone is findable after power-off as the Bluetooth radio remains active after shutdown, or is operating in its Power Reserve mode.

The BTLE radio is discoverable by other Apple devices that are within close proximity - as all other Apple devices (of which there a literally millions) detect the BTLE radio and anonymously report the detection along with their own location to Apple’s servers.

As your iPhone will be within 10m (30’) to be detected, the reported location will be relatively accurate.

Find My after power off uses the Find My Network, which is a crowd-sourced service. Your phone keeps Bluetooth enabled for 24 hours after it is powered off, so any other phone that comes within 30 feet of your phone will sense it and notify Apple’s Find My server of its location. But this depends on another late-model phone coming close to your lost phone.

There are many ways for a thief to disable Find My; a Faraday bag is an effective one, or just wrapping it in aluminum foil, or removing the SIM card if you don’t have an eSIM.

Find My is not primarily to find stolen phones, it is to find lost phones. Suppose you COULD locate your stolen phone. What would you do? Confront the thief? People have been murdered doing that; it isn’t really recommended.

Same issue happened with me with my iphone 13 and it was lost and stolen before that it was already updated to ios17 which enables the option to find my even of it is power off but when i try to use find my to see the location it was showing last scene of past 24 hours that was really frustrating for me and difficult to trust the brand. However this ensures that nothing happens even when it states that iphone will be findable after switchedoff.

The thief will turn the device back on after, you get it?