By Glenn Fleishman

May 12, 2025 9:00 AM PT

Apple Watch: I’d be lost without it

Six Colors subscriber Ampsonic asked:

Will an Apple Watch without cellular update Find My?

That’s a surprisingly complicated question to answer because of the Apple Watch’s unique place in the Find My ecosystem. The tl;dr is at the bottom of this article, but there is an interesting journey we can take to get there.

Find My offers device and item tracking

Apple suffers from the problem of feature proliferation and maturity. There are so many automated components, integrated elements, standalone apps, and systems that they don’t all receive the same attention. Find My is, fortunately, not one of them. Apple has devoted what feels like an extraordinary amount of effort to perfecting Find My, from its introduction to the addition of AirTag and other trackers. It even agreed to an industry compatible standard to help deter stalkers and unwanted tracking; Apple and Google apps for tracking their own devices now pick up those of the other company.

Maybe this is because of the value of finding lost stuff. Surely, that’s why Apple recently extended shared location access to AirTags and similar items. If one of these items is lost, you can share the location temporarily with someone else or even drop it into an airline’s lost luggage form.

There are a bunch of different things represented within Find My. There are devices (hardware with displays, plus most audio gear), people who have given you permission to see their whereabouts, and trackers—some of which are now embedded into things like bike-theft alarms.

Apple splits things into devices and items by how they report their location:

• Items have no internet connection and rely on the Find My network’s crowdsourcing function.
• Devices that have an internet connection update their location at regular intervals whenever they have an active link. This information is associated with your iCloud account.

Find my thing that’s not on the internet

All iPhones, iPads, and Macs that have a live internet connection identify Bluetooth broadcast names in their vicinity that use a particular pattern Apple has set up. This includes both items that can only broadcast their location and can’t connect to a network, and internet-capable devices that aren’t currently able to connect.

The Bluetooth broadcast name contains encrypted information only the Find My item or device owner can decode. A device with an internet connection relays the Bluetooth name with its calculated or GPS location information to Apple servers. Here are a few scenarios:

• You’ve brought your Mac to a cafe and haven’t connected to the network. It will broadcast its identity over Bluetooth, and iPads and iPhones with cellular or Wi-Fi connections and Macs connected to Wi-Fi or a personal hotspot will relay that.

• You parked your car in a vast garage and can’t find it, but anyone who has wandered by with an iPhone that can reach a cellular network will have relayed its location in the meantime.

• Someone has stolen your iPad with Wi-Fi only and is using an e-bike to scurry away. When you use the Lost Mode in the Find My app, you can track its location through the thief’s iPhone (if they have one) or the iPhones or other devices they pass by in their journey.

When you want to find the location of an item or device, you launch Find My. Find My on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, or iCloud.com will show the location of any devices you own and devices in your Family Sharing group with location tracking permission enabled for that person. To see items you own or that have been shared with you, you have to use a native app. iCloud.com can’t show item locations and crowdsourced locations because that requires end-to-end device-based encryption that isn’t yet supported within iCloud.com. (Even Apple can’t decode Find My network location and ownership data.)

(There’s one exception! If you temporarily share access to an item to get help recovering something you’ve lost or that was stolen, the person with that link uses a web app to view the location.)

That’s a lot of preamble to get to the answer!

The answer

The Apple Watch has been an odd hybrid since the introduction of the cellular option. An Apple Watch with Wi-Fi can independently connect to Wi-Fi networks, for which it has stored a connection synced from its paired iPhone. You can also join a network through the device itself since watchOS 5, although I don’t relish entering a long alphanumeric and punctuation password with the tiny on-screen keyboard.

So the answer is: Yes! But with a lot of different circumstances for an Apple Watch with just Wi-Fi:

• Wi-Fi only Apple Watch, iPhone nearby, iPhone connected to cellular: Your iPhone sends your Apple Watch’s location over the internet to your iCloud account.

• Wi-Fi only Apple Watch, no iPhone nearby, connection to Wi-Fi network: Your Apple Watch sends its location directly over the internet to your iCloud account. (It doesn’t use GPS, but approximates it using Wi-Fi positioning.)

• All other cases: Your Apple Watch acts effectively like a Find My item, broadcasting its identity via Bluetooth for relay by devices nearby with an active internet connection.

(If you have an Apple Watch with GPS + Cellular and it has an active cellular connection where you are, it will use GPS to transmit the current location, too, of course.)

As with a tree in the forest falling and making a sound with no one to hear it¹, an Apple Watch with no internet connection over Wi-Fi, cellular, or a paired iPhone and not in proximity of any other user’s Apple device cannot update its location.

If this wasn’t enough about Find My for you, I have implausibly written an entire book on this topic, Take Control of Find My and AirTags. Consult that title if you’re looking for more detail about setting up items, understanding how devices are tracked, deterring stalking or being aware of signs when someone is trying to track you, and working with alerts and privacy when you and other people share your location with each other.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing (Aperiodical LLC) and How Comics Are Made (Andrews McMeel Publishing).]

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