GPS Phone Recovery
For phones enabled with GPS, lets say you lost your phone (fell out of pocket while shopping, at friend's house), you would be able to send an SMS message to your number with a secret key that you set, and then it would respond with the GPS coordinates of it's location.
If someone stole your phone the first thing the thief does is power the phone off and take the SIM card out. From this moment on, there is no point in sending SMS to your phone. They will not arrive.
Operators can track a phone by IMEA - but they never do.
other feature ideas for this.
-lock the phone from being turned off (batter could still be removed, so might be pointless)
-show no indication on the phone so user is not tipped off. (opposite of above)
-constantly send coordinates so you can track.
-send commands through a specified header
-send coordinates again.
-set off loud alarm (so it can be found when you are within 100 feet or so).
-remote wipe (like current wm feature)
There's a lot more that can be done with this, these are just a few ideas.
I've added a tutorial for an application to do this:
http://www.helloandroid.com/node/159
Biggest issue here is security...maybe when someone sends the SMS ping to get the coordinates the user is prompted and can put in a secret password to ignore the ping.
This would be useful if someone figured out your key (ie (ex)girlfriend), but a thief wouldn't know your password to ignore the ping...I guess they could turn the phone off though...have to think about this a little more :)
this is a good idea. i have considered developing the same thing for windows mobile. i don't see much of a security issue. the way i imagined it, the phone would look at every incoming text message to see if contains the "lost phone" password. if the message doesn't contain the password (which of course should not be a dictionary word) then it would simply pass the message on to the app that normally handles SMS messages. so failed attempts to guess the password would simply appear as regular text messages. if the right password is sent, the phone should lock itself, send the GPS coordinates, last numbers dialed, etc to the number that sent the unlock password. however, it should still be unlockable by entering the user's normal password (which of course would not be the same as the lost phone password). so if someone guesses your lost phone password, your phone would simply lock, and you would have to unlock it and change your lost phone password. true, the person who guessed your password would receive your GPS coordinates, but if you choose a good random password, that is unlikely to happen.
So, now the question is....will Android allow an app to lock the phone down? Even if not, it would still be useful for lost/stolen phones.
There is no way to currently monitor SMS messages with the SDK unfortunately, because this would be a pretty easy application to implement, and would be a good tutorial for the tutorials section :)
There's an application that has already passed the test. Wizi is a location based social network that allows its users to share their location with their friends. Very recently a friend of mine left her phone in a cab and was able to retrieve it using Wizi. The story was published in their website:
http://wizi.com/blogs/wiziblog/archive/2008/05/13/chasing-a-cab-in-lisbo...
They have an Android version available for free download in their download page.