In a real theft situation SMS sent from a public phone or a nice random person willing to send those lock messages for you to your phone will fail their goal royally…
Why?
Very simple. The messages coming back will be either lost at this public phone or received by this random helpful person!
Information gathered in these “first minutes” must be also sent to the server. At the Police station you could show something. Maybe the thief is just sitting in a cafe in front of the Police station but the location info sent to a public phone or to a random person that helped you is lost for you. One thing needs to be clear, in a real theft situation obviously your phone is stolen and you can’t receive an sms. Before you are at home you won’t be able to see anything, although data is being collected and/but sent into a black hole…
Once you are at home, you won’t see much anymore usually because the sms have been send to a place where they can not be retrieved. All the information gathered while the thief brought the stolen stuff home is lost. Of course if you have a dumb thief that hasn’t turned off the phone it may still work.
Another weak point is that commands send via the web platform very often time out although the phone is logged into a network and that is good, otherwise the app would drain your battery.
Introducing SMS commands that also trigger data forwarding to the web platform would make this app really helpful in a real theft situation imho.