The Find My Items tab explained, button by button
The Items tab is the half of Find My that most iPhone owners never open until they buy a tracker. It looks sparse, a list, a map, five or six controls, and each of those controls does something quite specific, with quite specific requirements. This is a plain definition of each one, in the order you meet them.
What is the Items tab in Find My?
It is the list of every accessory registered to your Apple Account, kept separately from your Apple devices.
Find My has three tabs. People is for location sharing between individuals. Devices is for hardware signed in to your account: an iPhone, an iPad, a Mac, a set of earbuds. Items is for accessories that have no account of their own. Apple's own tag and every certified third-party tracker. They sit together because they are found the same way, through sightings relayed by passing Apple devices, rather than by reporting their own position.
How does an item get into the list?
Through Add Other Item, from an iPhone or iPad running iOS 14.5 or later.
Tap Add Other Item at the bottom of the Items tab, hold the button on the tracker until it chimes, and a card appears offering to connect it. You then give it a name and an emoji. That registration binds the accessory to your Apple Account, not to the handset in your hand, which is why the item survives a new phone and appears on your other devices immediately.
What does Play Sound do?
It makes the tracker's own speaker sound, over a direct Bluetooth link.
This is the control people misunderstand most. Play Sound is not a command sent around the world; it is a short-range instruction from a nearby Apple device to the tag. It works when something of yours is close enough to reach it, which is why it is the right tool for a rucksack in the house and the wrong tool for a rucksack in another town.
What does Directions do?
It hands the item's last confirmed position to Maps and plots a route to it.
Nothing clever is happening here. The coordinates on the card are passed to the Maps app exactly as if you had typed them, so the route is only ever as good as the sighting behind it. Check the timestamp before you set off, a location from nineteen hours ago will route you very accurately to somewhere the item no longer is.
What is Notify When Left Behind?
A separation alert that fires when the tag drops out of range of your phone somewhere you have not marked as trusted.
Switch it on per item. You can add trusted locations, home, an office, a relative's house, where the alert is suppressed, because being separated from your keys in your own kitchen is not news. Away from those places, walking off without the tagged item buzzes the phone within a street or two, with the last confirmed position already pinned.
What is Lost Mode for an item?
A hand-back route: a stranger who finds the tag can reach you without ever seeing your details.
Turn it on and you supply a contact method. A passer-by who holds their phone near the tracker gets a page showing that you want it back and how to make contact, brokered by Apple. Your phone number is not printed on anything. You also get a notification when the item is next seen, which is often the first useful news after something disappears.
What does Share This Item do?
It lends a tracker to another person so that it appears in their Items tab as well as yours, from iOS 17 onwards.
Both people need iOS 17 or later. The person you share with can see the location and ring the tag, and can be removed again at any time. This is the correct way to let a partner find the car keys, and it is also what stops their iPhone raising an unwanted-tracking alert about a tag that legitimately travels with them.
| Control | What it needs | Range it works over |
|---|---|---|
| Play Sound | An Apple device near the tag | Bluetooth, up to about 60 m |
| Directions | A recent sighting | Anywhere |
| Notify When Left Behind | iOS 15 or later | Bluetooth separation |
| Lost Mode | A contact method you supply | Anywhere |
| Share This Item | iOS 17 or later on both sides | Anywhere |
How Orbit Tag helps
Orbit Tag appears in this tab as an Other Item and answers every control listed above, because it is certified rather than improvised, no companion app of ours competes with Apple's, and no login to this shop stands between you and a button.
Two of those controls lean on the hardware directly. Play Sound drives an alarm of 80 to 100 dB, which is what makes it usable through a coat pocket or a cushion, over a Bluetooth link quoted at 60 m in the open. Lost Mode and the separation alert lean instead on the relay network, where sightings are encrypted by Apple and readable only by the account the tag belongs to.
The physical side is unremarkable in the way it should be: 36.3 mm square, 9 mm deep, near enough 10 g, IP67 sealing, a ring hole through the moulding with two rings included, and a CR2032 good for about two years that you swap by hand. Apple hardware from iOS 14.5 up is required, nothing on Android works, and there is no ultra-wideband radio, so Precision Finding is absent by design.
Two tags to a box, under £15, free UK delivery. read the specification.
By the team at iOS Tracker Revised
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