Android can now show your phone’s IMEI on the lock screen. The change is not a rumour or a teardown find: it is written into Google’s own Google System Services release notes for Google Play services v26.28, published on 20 July 2026, under the “Safety & Emergency” heading. Google’s wording is exactly one line long — “You can now find your device IMEI on the lock screen.” — and that single sentence is the whole of the official documentation so far.
What the IMEI on the lock screen actually does
Your IMEI is the 15-digit serial number that identifies your handset on any mobile network, independent of the SIM inside it. It is what a carrier uses to blacklist a stolen phone, what police use to log a theft report, and what a lost-and-found desk would need to match a device to its owner. Until now, reading it required unlocking the phone and going to Settings > About phone — which is precisely the one thing nobody can do with a handset that has been lost or stolen.
Putting it on the lock screen closes that gap. Anyone who picks up your phone can confirm the IMEI, check it against a stolen-device register, and get it back to you without needing your passcode.
Where you find it, and why we are hedging
Google has not published a settings path for this. Its own theft-protection help page still documents finding the IMEI only through Settings > About phone, with no mention of the lock screen at all. What we do have is an APK teardown by Android Authority, which found a toggle labelled “Device identifier on lock screen” in the Theft protection menu of Google Play services, with an in-app description reading:
This is your device’s unique IMEI that can help recover your device. On the lock screen, tap “Emergency” to find the info.
Read that carefully, because it is the important part: the IMEI is not printed on the lock screen itself. It sits behind the Emergency shortcut, one deliberate tap away. Teardown strings describe code that exists, not necessarily a screen that has reached you — so treat that path as strongly indicated rather than confirmed. Play services features also roll out server-side in stages, so the release note saying “you can now” does not mean every Android phone has it today. If the toggle is not in your Theft protection menu yet, there is nothing to fix; it has not reached your device.
The trade-off Google’s one-line note does not mention
An IMEI is a permanent, unique identifier that you cannot change, and it is useful to more people than the honest stranger who finds your phone on a train. Someone holding your locked handset — including whoever took it — can now read the number that identifies it. That number is the input for falsely reporting a device as stolen so it gets network-blocked, for IMEI cloning, and for social-engineering a carrier support agent who treats it as proof of ownership.
Google’s design choices here are genuinely sensible ones. Burying the number behind the Emergency screen rather than printing it on the wallpaper raises the effort required, and the teardown showed the option gated behind a toggle rather than switched on by default — though Google’s release note says nothing either way about the default state. But it is still a toggle you should make consciously. If you live somewhere phone theft is opportunistic and carriers act fast on IMEI blacklists, turning it on is a reasonable bet. If your threat model runs more towards targeted interference than losing a phone in a taxi, leaving it off costs you nothing — the IMEI is printed on your original box either way.
This is the same pattern as Android’s other recent lock-screen hardening, where the useful thing and the risky thing are the same feature seen from two directions — much like the 13-attempt lock screen limit in One UI 9. The right default is not obvious, which is exactly why it should be your call and not Google’s.
Sources: Android Authority
