Lost & Found iPhone with Find My iPhone - Feature Request

Question

Yes I found the lost phone and I'm very very grateful for the existing feature which works flawlessly once you get a hold of it but from a real life use case, there are things that can be improved that will make it more efficient and effective. This is a summary of feature requests that I figure from the real-life use case of Find My iPhone.
Earlier this week my friend dropped his iPhone on a cab and realize at the end of the day (he initially thought he left it at home) that it must have fell off his pocket in the cab where he can hardly remember the color of the cab let alone the license plate. Having said that I asked him if he had iCloud turned on (basically Find My iPhone in recent iOS) and so we checked. So here is where all the difficulties begin and please keep in mind that in a situation like this we're always in a hurry if not panicking.....
1. You typically have more than 1 mobile phones:
a.) Where its most likely different brand, model, or OS (you don't buy two identical phones) so in this case he has a Samsung Android where iCloud page can not be rendered - it throws an error. So this didn't work
b.) You need to borrow your friend's "iPhone" to find it and not many people find it obvious that you need to download the Find my iPhone app in addition to just activating iCloud to track a phone. Thats another long step considering in some countries u have a really crappy 3G or sometimes on Edge
c.) If you are lucky your friend have an iPhone or an iPad, you go to www.icloud.com it doesn't do anything except tell you "how to turn on icloud", download Find my Friends, and Find my iPhone.....you need a laptop browser to be able to use the tracking feature....why????? I understand that it won't work with other brands of mobile phones but these are both Apple's!!!
2. When you realize that you have lost your phone, you don't always have your laptop or an iPad - but you always have mobile phones let it be your secondary one or your friend's. Moreover, your laptop rarely have cellular connection so even if you have it, aside from the fact that it takes you 15 minutes to boot up your laptop, you also have to find yet ANOTHER phone to tether or find a 3G card to plug in to it so it can use cellular as oppose to just wifi, and then walk around with a laptop looking for the lost phone. And laptop don't have GPS, you don't know where you are relative to your lost phone.
3. You are trying to look for your iPhone from another iPhone (the most convenient way) but you only see ONE dot that shows your lost iPhone but not "you" who are walking around looking for it so you have to:
1.) Open the Find My Iphone app and then see where your phone is located
2.) Open up Google Map (sad but true, Google map is currently the preferable map) to find where you are. Why Google map? In a less developed country, google maps works a lot better in detail.
3.) Try to find where you are relative to where the lost phone is across 2 maps and 2 different apps. But even if it was Apple map, its still 2 different apps switching back and forth.
Yes, the idealistic case which would disregard all this is that you have 2 Apple devices logged on to the same iCloud account then you can see 2 dots but not everyone have enough of that to make it useful :-)
4. You use to have a send message button, lock the phone, make noise, and erase the phone. Now you need to first lock the phone before you can send a message. Understand that you should always lock the phone first but when you're panicking, making the feature obvious would help
5. Would be nice to know the "percentage" of the battery and being able to shut down all the apps, dim the screen, and etc. to maximize the battery time before the phone goes dead might be helpful.
It was almost a miracle to get the phone back in a place like this where people tend to immediately shut down your phone and throw away the sim card once they get a hold of it. My friend was very lucky that the phone was in silent and fell into the crack of the backseat and the cab was parked outside the garage so the GPS location was absolutely precise.
Having mentioned that, iOS7 new security feature that requires your Apple login credentials to erase or turn off Find my iPhone. My question here being it says, find my iphone can continue to display message even after erased - if that is the case will I still be able to track it as well? What if I'm the person who erased it remotely, will I still be able to display message as well as track it?

Answer 1

This is a user to user community, Apple are unlikely to read your comments, if you have any suggestions that you think might enhance iCloud you can send Apple your feedback here.
We also can't speculate on what exactly iOS 7's new security features will actually do, all that's available is what has been said so far by Apple, anyone using a developer version is forbidden to discuss it anywhere but in the developers community.