Permission is per device and by invitation. Nobody can ring a phone that has not explicitly said yes to them, and there is no code, no link and no lookup that gets around that.
- Open RingIt and start sharing permission for a device. The app asks for an email address and for which of your devices this applies to.
- Type the email address of the person who should be able to ring it. Pick someone who is usually nearby when you lose it: a housemate, a partner, whoever else is in the house.
- Send the invite. Until they accept it, nothing changes.
- Once they accept, they see your device in their app and one tap makes it ring.
Two things surprise people. The permission only goes one way: the app says so on the sharing screen itself, and if you want to be able to ring their phone as well, they have to add you from their side. And the permission is tied to the specific device you picked, not to your account as a whole, so a second phone or a tablet has to be shared separately.
Taking it back is just as direct. You can mute a person for an hour, a day, a week or forever, and you can remove them entirely. Muting stops their rings without deleting the permission, which is the right choice when someone is testing it at two in the morning and you would rather not have the conversation.
How RingIt helps
This is the whole of what RingIt does: a person you trust taps once, and your phone rings loudly even on silent, Do Not Disturb or sleep mode, using critical alerts on iOS and a bypassing alert channel on Android. The catch worth repeating is that it has to be arranged in advance, while you still have the phone. It also rings only. It never shows the other person where your phone is, and it does not work when the phone is off or has no connection.
The introduction to the app is in the RingIt blog's first post.
