Android Earthquake Alerts: A global system for early warning

Recently they had a significant country wide false alarm in Israel at 3AM... There was a emergency alert cell broadcast (similar to amber alert), which caused everyone to move their phone at the same time, which was falsely detected as an earthquake, which caused an Android earthquake alert to be sent to all phones in Israel 30 seconds later. I guess they didn't plan for this scenario

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"

This is really cool, and it smells like old-school Google, in a good way, like "let's do this because we can". It feels like it's been a while since something coming out of Google Engineering is meaningful and not designed to unlock new existential creeps, so, well done I guess.

> "Of those roughly 1,300 events that triggered alerts, only three were false positives. One of those was triggered by a different system sending an alert that vibrated a lot of phones, something that should be relatively easy to compensate for in software. The other two were both due to thunderstorms, where heavy thunder caused widespread vibrations centered on a specific location. This led the team to better model acoustic events, which should prevent something similar from happening in the future."

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 have received a few earthquake alerts (Greece). one was for a significant 5.2 earthquake about a month ago, and the notification arrived about one minute earlier or so. It woke me up , and i was able to experience the entire duration of the earthquake. Pretty cool if they were using the new system and i was impressed at the time.

Last time I received it I was on a 14th floor and I was terrified. Longest seconds of my life while I waited the P wave to arrive.

I thought this was ancient but apparently not. Searched back a bit:

- 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

Is this app native to Android OS xx ??

Is it by default on ? How can i check if its actually working ?

So many questions! None detailed in the article...

Few months back we experienced an earthquake. I got an alert on my Android, which at first I was confused about but took me a second to process that there is a possible earthquake and then we ran out and it was a 5.2 magnitude earthquake. So it is much improvement over the last time I experienced an earthquake and only knowing later that it was one about 3.5 or so.

I'm still hoping someone makes an earthquake detection system where the data is just derived from people posting "Earthquake?" on Twitter/Threads/Facebook/Etc. Plot the geotagged tweets and it seems easy to get both the location and magnitude.

This relies on the accelerometer being always turned on - which it typically isn't when the phone screen is off.

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 someone who lives in an earthquake prone area it's hard to explain the spooky feeling of receiving a message about an impending earthquake 2-3 seconds before it hits. To be honest it doesn't feel helpful. There's never enough time to react properly.