Location Tracking

Sharing your ETA with a contact using Apple Maps allows you to keep a friend or colleague up to date on your arrival time so that you can focus on driving. To share your ETA, you'll need to select a destination in Apple Maps and begin navigation. Let's dive in with how to share your ETA with a contact using the Maps app on your iPhone.

If you haven't used Apple's Do Not Disturb feature yet, it's a great way to silence notifications from calls, texts, and apps while your iPhone is locked. With iOS 12 and later, DND is now more versatile and useful than ever before with some long-awaited upgrades, including a location-based setting. Learn how to turn on Do Not Disturb for specific places, so your device doesn't start buzzing and beeping just when you need it to be quiet. 

I have been riding bicycles longer than I have been using computers. I have been riding the same recumbent for over 30 years. Yet it wasn't until the announcement of the Lumos Bicycle Helmet ($179.99) that I have been this interested in a bicycling accessory in a long time. This helmet combines bicycle safety with smart illumination to inform those around you of your direction and speed intentions. Read on to find out if this high-tech helmet was worth the wait.

If you need to find and track a lost iPhone, using the Find My app to locate your iPhone is the easiest method. If you've enabled the Find My iPhone feature in the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad, you can use Find My to locate the missing device, even if it's powered down or the battery's dead. Here’s how to find your iPhone when it’s lost, whether it’s offline, dead, or even if you don’t have Find My enabled for the iPhone.

A cool feature in the Photos app is the geolocation tool. With it, you can organize your photos by looking at them on a map. Let’s say you took a trip to Mexico. You can look at the map, which will show your photos in all the places you took them. Then you can look at Mexico, tap on your photos, and see all the pictures from your trip. Here’s how to view photos by location on a map with iPhone or iPad.

We tend to think of our iPhone getting hacked as a far-fetched scenario, but large tech companies like Apple pay big money to white hat (good guy) hackers to find the bugs and loopholes they can’t see. iPhones can definitely be hacked, even with the ever-increasing layers of security Apple implements to protect our devices. While it’s not worth panicking over, it’s good to take precautions and use the security features on our iPhones, and also to exercise caution to not unwittingly allow hackers access to our devices. You can do a lot to secure your iPhone and protect it from possible hackers. The 14 tips below will ensure you’ve implemented every safeguard possible; here’s how you can protect your iPhone from hackers, both local and remote.

Having a difficult time remembering where that picture from your spontaneous trip to the beach was taken? Or at what time you captured that beautiful sunset? The great thing about geotagging on iPhone is that you’ll never be left wondering when or where a particular photo was taken again—but for many, that might not be such a good thing. If revealing your location is a concern, you can easily turn this feature off. Here’s how to keep your camera from tracking your location on iPhone.

With iOS 10.3, Apple decided to soothe the fears of AirPod owners with a simple but smart solution: Find My iPhone. In the same way that you use Find My iPhone to locate your iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, or Mac computer, you can find your AirPods now too. Whether you lose one on your morning run and need to figure out where you dropped it or you simply can’t locate your AirPods in your messy house, here’s how to find your AirPods with iOS 10.3 on iPhone.

With Find My iPhone, you don’t have to worry as much about losing your phone. Here’s how to set up and use Find My iPhone. It’s easy to set up, and once it's enabled, you will be able to see the location of all your devices right there on the map view. You can even take steps to locate your iPhone if it's dead or offline. The best part of Find My iPhone is being able to see where your iPhone, iPad, and Mac are from any of your devices. That means if you've lost your iPhone, you can find its location from your computer. 

Location services on iPhone allows your apps to do all kinds of things, such as give you directions from your Current Location to your destination or track your jogging route with gps. You can also choose the specific apps that have access to your location information so you aren’t wasting battery or giving away more privacy than you need to. While location services on iPhone is pretty fundamental to a lot of the available functions, you can choose to turn off location services altogether. Whether you decide to turn location services on or off is entirely up to you and how you use your iPhone—we’ll go over both. Here’s how to turn location services on or off on iPhone.

In iOS 10, there are now two ways Siri makes app suggestions on the Lock screen. The first is the Siri app suggestions that appear in the Widget pane. The second are the time and location-based app suggestions that appear in the lower left corner of the Lock screen in the same place app icons appear when you’re using Handoff. If you don’t appreciate this feature, it’s easy to turn off app suggestions.

You might lose your iPhone or iPad, but Find My iPhone pretty much guarantees you’ll always at least know generally where it is, whether you left it at a friend’s house or at the bar (I did this once. Luckily my iPad was still there when I returned.) But what if you misplace your iPhone within your house and just can’t seem to find it anywhere? You can also use Find My iPhone to make your iPhone ping. You can do this from icloud.com or from a family member’s iPhone or iPad, if they are on the same Family Sharing plan as you. Either way, here’s how to use Find My iPhone to find iPhones misplaced in the house.

For some, the  frequent locations tracking feature on iPhone is just a little too big brother. Essentially, your iPhone tracks where you go, and if there is a location you visit often enough, it marks it as a frequent location. Your iPhone uses this feature to predict where you live and work, then give you automatic routing information when you get into your car to drive there. But if this feature is just a little too creepy for your liking, here’s how to turn off Frequent Locations on your iPhone.

Apple's free Find My Friends app allows you to track the location of friends and family members who have given you permission. The feature probably works best for keeping track of teenagers running around town, and Siri is happy to help you locate them.

Siri, you've changed! With the update to iOS 9, Siri's been supercharged, and one of the personal assistant's new skills is the ability to search Photos by the time or place they were taken. 

When you share your location with iMessage, you can quickly tell a contact where you are so that you can find each other more easily. To share your location, you'll need to open the contact's information inside the message thread and select Send My Location. Here's everything you need to know to send and share your location over iMessage.