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Thu, 12 Nov 2009 Orbicule adds push notification to Undercover iPhone recovery app

"Theft-recovery" device offers ways to help protect your investment

Nick Spence

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Orbicule has introduced an update of Undercover, an application it hopes will help locate a lost or stolen iPhone or iPod touch.

Billed as a "theft-recovery" device, it tracks the phone or iPod using built-in GPS when outside, while indoors Undercover tracks location based on Wi-Fi networks and mobile phone towers.

Undercover 1.5 uses push notifications to remotely launch Undercover on the stolen phone, making the theft-recovery software even more effective.

"Thanks to the push notification feature, our clients can now remotely activate our location tracking software if their iPhone is lost or stolen. Undercover is the first theft-recovery app for iPhone to do that," said Peter Schols, president of Orbicule.

Undercover could also prove useful when you have lost your iPhone. As soon as you set a message for the Finder, the phone will ring and Undercover will display the alert on top of any application that might be running. When the Finder views the message, Undercover will transmit your phone's location.

Available from the Apple iTunes App Store, Undercover costs £2.99 and requires the iPhone 3.0 Software Update or later.

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Comments received


Greg M said on Thu, 12 Nov 2009

Did MacWorld actually test this out? The push notification is not done in the background, when the thief receives the notification they have to click a button still to launch the application. If you want to track your device and wipe data buy MobileMe, this app from Orbicule is snake oil,there are also free apps in the App Store that do the same thing.

Mark Hattersley said on Thu, 12 Nov 2009

We haven't tested the app out yet, when we do we'll give it a score.

The idea of using push notification to provide a location finding service is interesting though, even if it requires a thief to interact with the phone. And at £3 it's a lot less than the £60 per year MobileMe service. Although it may be a lot less useful as well ;-)

Thanks for your thoughts on the push functionality though. Always good to get reader comments. We'll bear that in mind for the review.



Peter Schols said on Thu, 12 Nov 2009

Hi Greg,

What you are writing is not entirely correct: if a push notification is received when the phone is not in use (i.e. the time is being displayed on the phone), the user will have no choice but to accept the notification, and thus launch Undercover. In that scenario, the 'Slide to unlock' slider changes to 'Slide to view', so the thief has no other choice than launching Undercover.

Peter Schols
Undercover developer

Stephen said on Sat, 14 Nov 2009

Umm. So I and just about everyone I know password protects their phones. This seems like it will not work in this case. So in order to protect my phone from theft I have to put my data at risk. No thanks, I will stick with Mobile Me. Sort of surprised you guys actually charge people for this.

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