FindMy CLI

Why it's ranked here

It earns a look because it solves a real gap without cutting corners on trust: everything runs on-device, touches only people who already share their location with this Mac, and never opens a network connection. The code owns up to the fragility of driving a GUI instead of hiding it: capture failures, locale differences, and a recent macOS UI change that broke one feature are all handled explicitly rather than silently. MIT licensed and shipped through several install paths, it reads like a maintained tool rather than a one-off script.

What's good

The engineering shows real attention to the fragile parts of GUI automation. Ringing a device defaults to a dry run that reports where it would click before anything makes noise, and the actual click sequence retries with increasing delays because the map animation has no completion signal. Permission checks probe capture access directly rather than trusting a preflight call known to return stale results. Menu and sidebar text is localized across dozens of system languages, and every successful query appends a record to a local history file you can later query by name or time window.

Tradeoffs

The design that makes this work is also its ceiling: reading a live window means results break whenever Apple reshuffles the interface, and a recent system update already removed the detailed address view for one command with no replacement in sight. Every run needs the display awake, unlocked and briefly stolen for focus, so it does not fit unattended or headless use without extra hardware and configuration. Because it depends on screen capture and synthesized clicks, it also needs Screen Recording and Accessibility permissions granted and the host process fully restarted before anything works. It returns only coarse location, never coordinates.

How to use it well

This fits someone who already leans on Find My for casual check-ins on family or close friends and wants that lookup from a terminal, a chat agent, or a script instead of unlocking a phone. Set up aliases for the devices or people you check often, and use watch mode with diffing for a notification only when something changes, instead of polling by hand. It is the wrong tool for locating a device precisely enough to hand to police, or for finding a specific room in a building. For fleet tracking, third-party trackers with a real API, or exact coordinates, look elsewhere.

Observed

License

MIT licensed.

Language

Implemented in Go with a companion Swift helper binary for the macOS-only frameworks (Vision, ScreenCaptureKit, CGEvent) that Go cannot bind to directly.

Platform

macOS only; no Linux or Windows path exists in the codebase.

Interfaces

Interface is a command-line tool with a JSON output mode on every subcommand, plus a bundled Claude Code / OpenClaw plugin (skill and slash command) wrapping the same binary.

Packaging

Distributed through a Homebrew tap, an npm package, and a source build via a Makefile; no prebuilt binaries are committed to the repository.

Persistence

Persists observation history to a local, append-only SQLite database rather than any network service.

Architecture

The Go CLI and Swift helper communicate over subprocess exec and JSON on stdout, not a shared library or FFI binding.