Find lost Android

[Rgarner]

My friend lost his phone today. He bought a new one but prefers the other. How can we get it back?

 

[ocnbrze]

My friend lost his phone today. He bought a new one but prefers the other. How can we get it back?

if he has a google account he can use google's find my phone:

https://myaccount.google.com/find-your-phone?pli=1

 

[Hadron]

Or go old school: go back to where he last remembers having it and see whether anyone found it and handed it in?

I put my email address on my lockscreen (not the GMail one I use with the phone), so that if any honest person finds it they can contact me. The one time I lost a device (pre-smartphone) this did actually result in it being returned to me. But obviously that doesn't help if he didn't do it already.

 

[Rgarner]

I got his phone back, thank goodness. Some honest person dropped it off at the bus station. I don't know why he couldn't find it when he was there, but all's well that ends well...

 

[Rgarner]

I was checking out the phone and found that it had sonehow downloaded a bunch of garbage. It said 100 apps (not counting system and such). I deleted more than 20 and dropped % storage used from 33 to 25. Most of them claimed to come from mobile services. How do we prevent this? Also, the phone is supposed to restart at 7 pm to receive an "important" update, just more bloatware. How do we prevent that?