Find My iPhone, first announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this year, tracks the location of any MobileMe user who enables the feature. Because of the iPhone’s lack of background processing, Find My iPhone hasn’t been launched as a full-blown service with an API that developers can tap into. But Tyler Hall has created an unofficial Find My iPhone API, dubbed Sosumi, which he has released on Github.
As Hall explains it on his blog:
“Sosumi is a PHP script that scrapes MobileMe and exposes Apple’s Find My iPhone functionality to the command line or your own web application. This lets you pull your phone’s current location and push messages and alarms to the device.”
Hall uses Yahoo’s Fire Eagle location brokerage and gets around Apple’s restrictions by running a cron job on his own server rather than on the iPhone itself. It then pushes location updates to the iPhone every 15 minutes.
