Edit: Arstechina article seems to mention this: "only three were false positives. One of those was triggered by a different system sending an alert that vibrated a lot of phones"
The whole country moving phones in random directions at exactly the same time isn't what an earthquake signature should look like.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/07/how-android-phones-b...
Do the range of detectable acoustic sources include military jets, drones, and bomb blasts (i.e., gauging effectiveness of targeting?) I don't know what I'm supposed to think of tech companies turning gadgets into remote-root physics sensors without user consent. Maybe I'm reflexively cynical; I can't trust a FAANG with yet another side-channel attack, *even if* the first (public) application is, on appearance, a life-saving unalloyed good.
I was surprised as I didn't even know it was a thing.
I was also a bit spooked as it was in the ocean, near the coast, and when I turned on my FM radio as we were always taught in school, all I heard were pre-recorded music programs.
Turns out it didn't meet the threshold for a warning so the authorities didn't issue any message about tsunami danger. I think they should've anyway, as I wasn't the only one that had that thought.
If you'd search online you could have known quickly there was a negative Tsunami notice, but I get that this is just not feasible for everyone (or everytime).
Feel like the severe weather SMS etc are working quite decent, I wish they'd expand that for those sort of things as well (like there was an earthquake, this is what you should do next).
The Android notification was a bit odd, because it's not trivial to get back to that notification if you've just skipped/acknowledged it.
This what earthquake causes sometimes. So knowing that it was an earthquake would not change it, would it?
- Feb 2016: third-party app starts doing it, so you had to go out of your way to install it but it may hit critical mass at some point. This is probably what I was thinking of --https://earthquakes.berkeley.edu/blog/2016/02/11/seismic-sen...
- Aug 2020: "Starting today", if the accelerometer shows a trace that "may be an earthquake, it sends a signal to our earthquake detection server, along with a coarse location". "we’ll use this technology to share a fast, accurate view of the impacted area on Google Search". Alerts were additionally issued in part of the USA based on government data --https://blog.google/products/android/earthquake-detection-an...
- Mar 2022: up to three USA states now with government data, rest of the world gets alerts based on crowdsourced data. Article mentions "2+billion Android phones in use around the world" (I take that to mean "2.1 billion Google Play Services devices"). If the quake is expected to be heavy, it "Will break through Do Not Disturb settings, turn on your screen and play a loud sound" --https://crisisresponse.google/android-alerts/
- Jul 2025 (this submission): nothing seems to have changed (still govt data for the same subset of the USA), but some stats on how it's going and that accuracy is improving. It notes that, to receive alerts, users must have "location settings enabled"¹ (and internet of course). About 1/3rd of the alerts are true positives that are also received before the shaking, but 85% of people found it 5/5 very helpful
¹ This confuses me. Surely Google doesn't get your location every ~10 seconds to know whether to send your device an alert; that's too battery-draining. Maybe it sends your location a few times per day~hour and they'll just use that? Because the alternative option, if the server sends "earthquake in {geojson polygon}" to all devices, the OS could just check your (last known) location without having to care about whether you want to provide location info to apps. I have the user-level location setting turned off whenever I'm not routing/mapping because why'd I want GNSS to be running... well, for this apparently, but it never told me this
Why not?
You can use router IP address for location and WiFi to send. Minimal power consumption.
Sadly my IP is routinely from the wrong country and I don't use a VPN
Thats a decent amount of extra energy being used globally! And also everyone's batteries dying a little sooner.
I wonder what sample rate they have the accelerometer running at, and if it is just one axis to save power? Typically 8 bit single axis 1Hz sampling is ~10 microamps, but full 10 kHz 3 axis sampling could be 10 milliamps = 1000x more power use!
As always.
Google "AI search" results claim that because Canada has its own early warning system, Android Earthquake Alerts aren't available in Canada.
I think we both would have assumed it was for back home in California if not for the fact that we were in a country that ALSO has earthquake and tsunami history.
By the time she asked I just said "well, either way, if we don't feel anything in the next few seconds, we're fine." and then went back to sleep.
In retrospect, I didn't think to wonder where the alert came from. I suppose it must have been from the MyShake app on our iPhones which are connected to the ShakeAlert system. But maybe it was the Wireless Emergency Alert system? I'm not sure how that works overseas.
It's not really a new idea, i don't know what happened to this project though.
[1] https://portaluchile.uchile.cl/noticias/119844/twitter-ayuda...
Tracking social would be useful for plotting where quake was felt.
Back in 2011 there was an earthquake that New Yorkers felt. There were New Yorkers who read tweets of people further south on the East Coast posting about feeling an earthquake, and then the New Yorkers feeling the same earthquake a few seconds later.
There were some news outlets that picked up the story which you can find, but not exactly what OP was discussing.
[1] https://www.ralphehanson.com/2011/08/25/earthquakes-social-m...
[1] https://www.usgs.gov/media/audio/shaking-and-tweeting-usgs-t...
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau9824 [2] https://www.science.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.112...
https://scistarter.org/the-twitter-earthquake-detection-prog...
I did find this and some papers that seem related
Enabling location settings is a global configuration. Can’t this be configured just for this purpose?
Is it by default on ? How can i check if its actually working ?
So many questions! None detailed in the article...
Really curious to know.
It'd be cool if they'd partner with governments to send the alerts out through the same means as amber alerts and such.
Fixing bugs in Google products is no fun. Better make something else what nobody needs.
So the company notorious for killing projects is going to tackle infrastructure grade systems? I don't trust Google to tackle this problem.
I could see smartphone seismometers being useful for areas that don't have all that. OTOH, if phones are useful seismometers, it should be possible to make cheap, dedicated ones.
iPhone users were a bit annoyed though, because it only worked on Android phones.
10 years is enough the ensure that any professional and company trying to make a living from earthquake early detection systems is working on something different.
yeah, someone will pop up after they inevitably kill it, but this stuff can end up delaying progress.
Case in point: No one built a group-chat for our government officials cause Telegram is free.
Always curious why people comment like this when they have a choice to, you know, not do it
Not OP, but it's still an important consideration - one can be both glad Google is working on this, but also cautiously optimistic given Google's history. IMO it's right to be wary of private entities taking care of what should effectively be a public service.
