How to find your lost Samsung Galaxy Ring

Knowing in advance how to find your lost Samsung Galaxy Ring is important, because you need to set up the "find my ring" features before you lose it, not after. It'll only take you a minute, assuming you have a Galaxy phone.

The Galaxy Ring has no built-in GPS or UWB. The Galaxy Wearable app will save the last known location based on your phone's GPS data, but if you leave your Galaxy Ring in a public bathroom and someone takes it, you'll have no way of finding it.

Worse, if you connect your Galaxy Ring to a non-Samsung phone, you have no way of tracking it, because the system uses the Samsung Find app only available through the Galaxy Store. All you can do is light up the ring's LEDs to make it more visible, which won't help if the tiny wearable falls into a couch cushion.

Our Galaxy Ring reviewer has middling impressions of it thus far, and his inability to track it with a non-Samsung phone is a big knock against it. Still, for Samsung phone owners, here's how to find your lost Galaxy Ring!

How to find your lost Samsung Galaxy Ring

Note: As mentioned above, most of the steps below only work on Samsung phones. 

1. On your Galaxy phone, open Settings > Security and privacy > Lost device protection. 

2. Toggle Offline finding and hit Turn on on the subsequent pop-up screen.

3. Open the Galaxy Wearable app. If you have multiple devices connected — like the Galaxy Ring and Galaxy Watch 7 — and the Galaxy Ring isn't immediately visible, tap the devices button (a hovering circle with two squares and circles) and switch to it.

4. Tap Find My Ring at the bottom of the app menu.

5. Samsung will tell you to enable location permissions. Be sure to enable these to allow devices to be found. 

At this point, Samsung will track the Galaxy Ring's location by default in the Samsung Find app, which Samsung uses instead of Google's Find My network. 

With a Samsung phone, you open Samsung Find and tap your ring under Devices. A Galaxy Ring icon will appear wherever it was last detected, whether online or offline.

You'll see the Blink light option, as well as a Refresh button to update its last known location. Under More, you can toggle Notify me when it's found or Notify when left behind. The latter is especially useful for warning you immediately if your phone detects it disconnecting.

With a non-Samsung phone, your process is simpler (and less useful). Open the Galaxy Wearable app and tap Find My Ring. You'll find a threadbare menu with only one option: Tap Start to make the Galaxy Ring LEDs blink.

Finding your Galaxy Ring shouldn't be a Samsung exclusive

It's a common trend for Samsung to make vital tools exclusive to push you to buy all of their devices, like making life-saving AFib detection on the Galaxy Watch 7 or Galaxy Watch Ultra restricted to the Health Monitor app.

In this case, Samsung made a few Galaxy Ring features exclusive to Samsung phones, including the Energy Score, Wellness Tips, and gesture controls. But making the Find My Ring feature Galaxy exclusive, with no alternative option like Google's network, is borderline inexcusable for a device this small and expensive.

Our Galaxy Ring tester tried connecting it to Google's Find My Network, but it wasn't visible. The official Samsung Galaxy Ring page claims that the lost ring feature "requires a smartphone with the SmartThings app," but he couldn't make the Galaxy Ring appear there, either. He even tried a third-party Bluetooth finder app to see if he could use it to hunt it down locally; again, it wasn't visible in the devices list. 

We've emailed Samsung to ask whether they have any plans to add lost-ring tracking to the best Android phones besides Samsung's own. They responded that "Android phone users will see blinking lights when prompted to locate their ring," and didn't provide further details. As it is, it's extremely easy to lose track of a smart ring unless it's left in plain sight, and you should be careful whenever you take it off to note where you've left it.