Plan B (for Android)

By Sara Yin

If you found your way here by Googling "lost my phone now what" (enough of you have to prompt a Google auto-fill entry) you've come to the right place. Lookout's free Plan B app for Android devices is an easy, last-ditch effort to locate your device without having the app pre-installed . It really does work, as long as your device is connected to the Internet through Wi-Fi or cellular data, or GPS.

Unfortunately Plan B doesn't support anything newer than Android 3.0.x (Honeycomb), nor Android 4.0.x (Ice Cream Sandwich). But for the 86.4 percent of you running anything less, Plan B is a great, sorry, plan B for if you've lost your device and don't have pre-installed mobile security protection.

But don't make the same mistake twice, of not securing your device. Plan A is to install a mobile security app that mitigates the damage of a lost or stolen device. Lookout Mobile is our Editor's Choice for mobile security suites, bundling anti-loss with malware protection, but lighter-weight apps like Where's My Droid and Seek Droid deliver remote locate functions as well.

How it works
Plan B basically takes advantage of a loophole in older, pre-Honeycomb Android versions that lets Google remotely fire up an app, from, in this case, the Google Play website.

For the end user, there are only two steps to take after losing your phone: first, log into Google Play from any Web browser, find and install the 72kb app, specifying your lost device. The app will automatically install on the lost device and start running.

Second, check your Gmail account associated with Google Play. Within minutes, you should receive an email estimating your device's geolocation on a Google Map. For the next ten minutes, Plan B will refine the location and keep emailing you updates. If GPS is turned on, it can send you precise latitude/longitude coordinates.

Did Plan B Find My Phone?
I tested Plan B with a "lost" Samsung Galaxy S II running Android 2.3.5. Setup was fast. Minutes after I installed the app onto the device through my Web browser, I received an email from Lookout with a Google Map showing a radius of where my phone could be. Over the next 20 emails I received ten more email updates, with the location fine-tuned down to a pinpoint on a Google Map. Geolocation can't get as specific as, say, showing that your missing phone is just underneath your bed, but it can narrow it down to a building or street.

If the GPS on your phone is off, Plan B will try to automatically enable it. And, if that doesn't work, the app uses cell-tower triangulation to approximate the location, though GPS geolocation is more accurate. The app wasn't able to turn on my device's GPS, however.

Once you've retrieved your device, count your blessings, and then please, please, please install a mobile security app. Most suites nowadays include lots of remediation methods for lost or stolen phones: remote wiping, remote lock, remote screamer, data backup, not to mention anti-malware features. Check out our list of the best Android security suites to download your next plan A. For example, Editors' Choice pick Lookout Mobile?lets you remotely locate, lock, scream, and wipe your lost device from a Web portal. F-Secure Mobile Security, another solid security app, uses text-based commands to remotely lock and wipe a missing device.

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