I’m sure most of us have had  that sinking feeling when we’ve gone to check for our mobile and realised we’ve left it somewhere.  As mobiles have becoming an increasing part of daily life, the need to keep then safe has obviously increased.

I usually always keep my phone close by or in a safe place but recently I left my phone in work and only realised it was gone when I’d got home.

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As the panic set in the typical things rushed through my mind like, were did I have it last, was it locked and being an Android user, had I registered it with Android Device Manager ?

Apple users had the locate your device feature for a while (Find My Phone) before Google rolled out a version for Android, but it was a welcome addition and has improved over the years.

Anyway once I’d answered those questions and managed to locate and retrieve my phone I learnt a couple of leasons which I thought might be worth sharing.

1) Definitely setup and test Android Device Manager on all your devices when you first buy them. It’s worth doing a test lock too so that you know what happens, for example, I didn’t realise that  notifications can still be seen when the device is locked.

2) On Android Lollipop (5.0) the new feature of lock screen notifications is great but what I didn’t initially realise is that if you don’t customise the visibility of these notifications any user picking up the phone can see them.  This is made worse by the fact that notifications in Android can be quite rich i.e. contain images and large text chunks (see example below)

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This is probably not a huge issue but might be worth being aware of if you wanted to keep an email or chat private and your phone was lost somewhere.

A great tip to restrict visibility of any notifications on the lock screen quickly is to long press on one and then tap on the ‘i’ icon, this will display the notification options were you can tap the ‘Sensitive’ option. The notification will then be hidden in the notification  panel and on the lock screen.

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I hope this helps a few people look after their prized possessions!