How to Turn Off Find My iPhone Remotely
February 5th, 2021
Today's video is going to be about how to turn off the "Find my..." feature on an iPhone (transcript below).
Now the "Find my iPhone" feature is an anti-theft feature that Apple designed so that if you lose your iPhone, or you give it away to someone and they erase it/reset it, but you haven't turned off that find my feature the third party will not be able to get past the welcome screens. Instead it will force them to connect to Wi-Fi during those welcome screens and then it's going to come up with an error message stating, "This iphone is already attached to someone else's icloud account." So why does this happen? Well a lot of times if you're giving your phone away or you're selling it, you go into your settings screen and you scroll all the way down to the bottom and you click on the reset option, and then you go to "Erase all content and settings." Now if you do this all without turning off the "Find my iPhone" feature, the phone is still going to be erased. In other words all your data is going to be removed from the phone, but the next person that gets it will not be able to proceed through the welcome screens because the "Find my iPhone" feature is still turned on. So ideally if you have the phone in front of you still you can go to the "Find my iPhone" section and turn it off. Now I'm just going to type in the search box here in Settings "find" because a lot of times things are buried and hard to find. So you can see here the "Find my iPhone" (or Find my Phone) feature comes up. And, so here it is—you can see "Find my iPhone" is turned on. Now you'll want to go ahead and open that "Find my iPhone" menu and toggle that green switch there to off and that will turn the "Find my iPhone" feature off on your phone. It's probably going to ask for your password and maybe the two-step authentication if you have it turned on, but once you turn that "Find my iPhone" off then you can reset the phone and it will be completely removed from your iCloud account. But, what if you've already given the phone away to someone or you've already sold it and they're coming to you and saying, "Hey, I can't use the iPhone you sold me or gave me because it's still locked to your iCloud account. Well, let me show you how to do it remotely.
All right so you can remove an iPhone from the "Find my iPhone" feature from just about any computer that's connected to the internet. Here I've just got a Safari browser window opened up and the website you want to go to is http://www.icloud.com/find. The keyword there is "find" and that's going to take you right to the page that we need to be on so again icloud.com/find. It's going to have you log in first and of course enter your password. Then you can see it loads a page that looks like a map in the background and that's how you know you've landed on the right place. Then at the top it's going to list your devices. Right now I have just one device with the "Find my iPhone" feature turned on and of course this is the iPhone that we want to remove. So I'm going to click on it and then it shows me the current location and brings up this dialog box off to the upper right corner. Now if you're looking at these options you might be wondering, "Well how do I remove it because all I see is a "Play Sound," "Lost Mode," and then "Erase iPhone." Now that's what makes this kind of confusing as you have to initiate the "Erase" option in order for the "Remove" option to appear. I think Apple did that because they wanted to make sure before you remove it that your iPhone is indeed erased since once you remove it you can't go back in there and control it remotely with these options. So we're going to go ahead and initiate the "Erase iPhone" option and that's going to bring up another dialog window. Here we're going to click the "Erase option." For security it's going to have you enter your password one more time and then if you've got two-factor authentication turned on it's going to send a six-digit code to one of your other devices. Go ahead and enter the six-digit code and if you've never used this browser before it's going to pull up the "Trust this browser" message. You can just click "not now."
All right so then you're going to see a couple options here in the upper right. You can see it's giving you the option to put a phone number in. Now if you indeed lost your iPhone and you wanted your phone number to appear on the device once it's in the hands of someone else, this is where you'd put that phone number in. But, for us we just want to remove it so we're going to skip that and leave that blank. Hit "Next" and then you also see an option to add a message. And, we're going to leave that one blank as well, so hit the "Done" text. Then you'll see what happens...it comes up and it says "Erase started." All right so it's trying to remotely erase the iPhone assuming that it's connected to the internet. This should be successful. Now I don't know if you caught it, but for a split second there was a "Cancel" or "Stop Erase Request" that showed up. So if your iPhone is not connected to the internet and you want to remove it you can still cancel the erase request and then the "Remove from account" option should appear. So that's just another thing to keep in mind, but for us the erase was successful so now we've got the "Remove from account" option. So don't stop now you want to finish up by clicking the "Remove from account" option and you can see it gives you one last confirmation. Now as soon as you click "Remove" you will not be able to go back and remotely control the iPhone so make sure you really do indeed want to remove it, and we do so we're going to click "Remove." And, there you go! Notice how no devices are listed here now. If you had other devices on your iCloud account before you would still have a pull down box and I would recommend just pulling that box down at the top and just making sure the device that you thought you just removed really is missing. Otherwise if you've removed all your devices it's going to look like this with just a map in the background.
Now let me interject one important distinction to make. A lot of folks when they're trying to turn off the "Find my iPhone" feature they land on the iCloud settings page showing your device history, especially if you're doing it on a mobile device. So they think that if they click on the device and click the "x" that that's going to turn off the "Find my iPhone" feature. And this is actually completely separate. This list here of my devices is completely separate from the "Find my iPhone" page and you can see we just removed this particular device from the "Find my iPhone" page but it's still showing up under "My Devices" which is completely normal. This list here is almost like a history of devices that you signed into with your iCloud account. You can certainly remove it from here—it doesn't do any harm—but just remember that this is not the place that you want to land if you're trying to turn off the "Find my iPhone" feature. If you remove it from the devices here, but you fail to go and remove it from your "Find my..." section, it's still going to be linked to your iCloud account with the "Find my iPhone" feature turned on. So definitely make sure you land on a page with a map in the background. If for some reason you do land on the settings page, you can get to it up here in the menu under the "Find my iPhone" section.
All right so now that you've got the "Find my iPhone" feature disabled you might be wondering, "What happens to your iPhone itself?" Well, you can see here that it brought the iPhone back to the welcome screens. It reset the iPhone completely. All your data has been removed and now it's ready for the next owner to go through the welcome screens. Well I hope you found this video helpful. Here at Jay Brokers we deal with iCloud issues quite a bit as you can imagine. We are a risk-free second-hand marketplace; we make it safe and easy to get a cash offer on just about anything worth over $100 bucks that's easy to ship, so definitely check out our website. You can get an instant cash offer on over 2,500 common products just like this iPhone today that we're removing from the iCloud account. We have Android phones, Microsoft laptops—again 2,500 common products that you can get an instant offer 24/7 from the convenience of your home. Now some of the things that our customers appreciate most about Jay Brokers is, first off we always pay the agreed upon amount for the agreed-upon item—no bait and switch gimmicks ever. And secondly we always pay our customers on the next business day after receipt rain or shine. So if you're looking to sell your Apple iPhone or another item worth over $100 bucks, definitely check us out as we would sincerely like to earn your business. Thanks for watching!
