Android Earthquake Alerts: A global system for early warning

https://research.google/blog/android-earthquake-alerts-a-global-system-for-early-warning/

238•michaefe•11h ago

Comments

fusionadvocate•10h ago

>"[...] and builds user trust with each successful alert"

So the company notorious for killing projects is going to tackle infrastructure grade systems? I don't trust Google to tackle this problem.

homebrewer•10h ago

I live in a seismically active (and poor) area. Dunk on Google all you want, they're the only organization who provide earthquake alerts in my area. The government has better things to spend money on (like pervasive corruption), but Google usually sends a notification 30-60 seconds before a perceptible earthquake happens.

ianburrell•10h ago

Google (and Apple) has been partnering with ShakeAlert from USGS for quake reporting on west coast of US. But that takes network of seismometers and detection system.

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.

homebrewer•9h ago

The closest one (that I know of) is approximately 1000 km away, and it does provide data about earthquakes, but only after the fact. They already have some information sharing, because I usually look up the info on usgs.gov, but almost certainly not in real time.

Aachen•8h ago

Note that they're also one of the only ones who can unilaterally choose to preinstall this on a majority of devices around the world. Of course I agree that it's good that they do it, for free and all, but to put it in perspective it's either each government for themselves or one of the two global superpowers that have devices with accelerometers and constant internet connectivity on every square kilometer of this oblate spheroid

el-salvador•7h ago

We’ve had this Google service in El Salvador for a while, and it’s really cool. The first time we received an earthquake alarm we felt like we were living in Japan. I never thought we would have Japanese-style earthquake alerts here.

iPhone users were a bit annoyed though, because it only worked on Android phones.

bitpush•10h ago

Are you always this salty, so it is only certain topics that make you do this?

Always curious why people comment like this when they have a choice to, you know, not do it

baxtr•9h ago

But isn’t that also what makes us special? Like not everyone is the same and stuff?

transcriptase•9h ago

I assume you’ve never had the delightful experience of relying on a product Google built or acquired then let decay or killed outright because it doesn’t contribute to ad revenue and the people who cared leveraged it in their promo packet to go elsewhere.

thezilch•9h ago

No business has the obligation to keep running what you find useful. If it was that useful, someone else will make it.

If no one is doing it or well, I see no reason to just complain and offer no solution. If there are other solutions and Google is going to hurt or destroy "competition", that's what should be discussed.

transcriptase•8h ago

You’re allowed to just say I’m right. When Google puts enormous amounts of resources into something like Google Home, then acquires Nest, haphazardly merges the two ecosystems while co-opting the Nest brand for unrelated products, then effectively abandons it except for the occasional update that breaks prior functionality? Sure, no obligation. But I’m not being some sort of whiny brat by pointing out that your experience with Google is driven by what will eventually become forced updates meant to drive you away from a product so they can kill it, because the internal culture/incentives promote launching and not maintaining or improving.

atim1412•3h ago

Someone else won't make it because they already have this for free. Well for this particular case, I think having Google product might just be better than none. But for some more critical things like typhoon warning, when people actually make decision based on data from the system, relying on a product that might get killed 5, 10 years later is worse.

If your infra is critical enough, they should nationalized, publicly owned.

thewebguyd•9h ago

> 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.

thezilch•9h ago

But how boring and unhelpful to have someone post it on every product that Google builds.

Aachen•8h ago

> cautiously optimistic given Google's history

Did you mean cautiously pessimistic? Or maybe that's my bias from reading HN threads where this is a reliable theme in Google product threads, as well as seeing the list of killed products, while not seeing a list of kept-alive products

kccqzy•8h ago

Google alone tackling this problem for 10 years and then killing it is still better than no one solving this problem and no one getting 10 years of free earthquake alerts.

kobalsky•8h ago

big companies doing stuff for free can kill industries.

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.

curiousObject•5h ago

Case in point: Google providing Android for free killed Windows Phone, Symbian, PalmOS, Blackberry, and several other attempts to create a mobile device OS

Which was among the reasons that Google did that, not that the company would say so.

atim1412•3h ago

Local government is disincentivized to build a system because they already has something up for free from the Big Tech.

Case in point: No one built a group-chat for our government officials cause Telegram is free.

seydor•10h ago

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.

IvyMike•10h ago

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.

ianburrell•9h ago

I don't think that is fast enough since the window for alert is seconds to minute. The alert lets people get to safety and stop systems like trains.

Tracking social would be useful for plotting where quake was felt.

Robelius•9h ago

This reminded me about an old blogpost I read. This linked post may not be the one I remember, but it's close[1].

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...

nemomarx•9h ago

I swear Twitter or Google was working on this?

https://scistarter.org/the-twitter-earthquake-detection-prog...

I did find this and some papers that seem related

donalhunt•6h ago

When Twitter had an open API, some tech teams actually used it as an additional source for detecting incidents that internal monitoring missed (similar to how electricity grid operators watch TV to understand when demand surges are going to occur due to half time in sports games, etc).

jerojero•9h ago

I remember many years ago seeing exactly this project being led by a researcher in Chile [1].

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...

alright2565•6h ago

Google has this. I remember recently feeling a minor earthquake, and googling it. The message that came up said that others had felt it too in my area, and then it showed up on official databases a few hours later.

robochat•5h ago

The USGS created a system to do exactly this about 15 years ago. I’m not sure whether they’re still running it but at the EMSC, we've been running a similar system for many years to highlight earthquakes important to the public and improve our messaging. Twitter doesn’t give access to geotags anymore but we do manage to roughly estimate an earthquake’s location by analysis of the tweets. Estimating magnitude is much more difficult. Naturally there are some false positives but it works well overall.

[1] https://www.usgs.gov/media/audio/shaking-and-tweeting-usgs-t...

robochat•4h ago

We actually use the twitter detections to launch analyses of the seismic data in order to get confirmed results for events that aren’t reported yet [1] but there are some statistics for the twitter detections in the supplementary material of that article [2]. Basically, in 2016-2017 (wow, so long ago), we detected 893 earthquakes via twitter, with a median delay of 67s and a median separation from the published epicentre of 94km. Note that estimating earthquake epicentres is nontrivial anyway and so, for comparison, 10km accuracy would often be considered ok. So the twitter, I mean X, method isn’t optimal but it gets you down to the right region. Partly it’s because geocoding the tweets is inaccurate and partly it’s because people live clumped together in cities rather than smoothly spread over the surface of the earth.

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau9824 [2] https://www.science.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.112...

irvymike•9h ago

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"

underdeserver•9h ago

I heard it was the cell broadcast which caused the phones to vibrate at the same time, not people picking them up.

ls-a•9h ago

Typical Google product. Reminds me of a person who put a bunch of phones in a car and drove which caused Google maps to wrongly show traffic in that area. It was deliberately done though as an experiment

kylecazar•8h ago

Better yet, he put them in a child's wagon and carted them around Berlin

xattt•4h ago

One of the last before-times human interest stories: https://www.wired.com/story/99-phones-fake-google-maps-traff...

Miraste•7h ago

That would be quite an implementation flaw if it didn't account for the phone's own vibrations. Lots of countries use widespread emergency alert messages frequently.

irvymike•7h ago

They fixed this bug, we had plenty of emergency cell broadcasts since the false alarm.

dylan604•3h ago

if (!isShakerRunning) { sendAlert() }

seems like a pretty obvious thing to add

underdeserver•1h ago

Only obvious once you've thought of it I suppose...

Aachen•9h ago

Note that those are three completely false events. The survey results Google published show 15% of people not feeling any shaking (neither strong nor light). That's still a good figure, but reading there were only 3 false positives gave me the impression that you're basically always in for a ride when you get the alert and it's not that miraculously accurate either

CGMthrowaway•8h ago

I was thinking the same thing. A taylor swift concert where she tells everyone to sway their phones in unison might trigger this

avs733•4h ago

From memory I think earthquake oscillation profiles are higher frequency then swaying side to side is likely to be.

Mogzol•2h ago

I would assume the detections would need to come from a larger area than that to trigger it, like city sized.

unixhero•5h ago

Maybe it was due to the blasts from their own ordenances

dheera•4h ago

Surprised they don't do some signal processing on all the IMU signals to see if they correlate (to within a rotation matrix), and if the timing of shaking at different locations is consistent with the distance to some (solvable) epicenter.

The whole country moving phones in random directions at exactly the same time isn't what an earthquake signature should look like.

srameshc•9h ago

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.

Aachen•9h ago

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

robochat•5h ago

There is also the Earthquake Network (EQN) app that works on very similar principals to Google’s system - phones monitor their MEMs accelerometers, when they are left charging with their screen off, and when enough neighbouring phones detect vibrations simultaneously an earthquake is detected and apps nearby are alerted. It’s been running since 2012.

[1] https://sismo.app

Rebelgecko•5h ago

I wouldn't be surprised if coarse location on Android doesn't even bother turning on the GPS. You can do a lot with cell towers and wifi ssids

chrini3930•4h ago

> 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?

Why not?

You can use router IP address for location and WiFi to send. Minimal power consumption.

perihelions•9h ago

> "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.

mnky9800n•9h ago

You could probably also use this system for seismic imaging too.

londons_explore•8h ago

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!

duskwuff•8h ago

Most MEMS accelerometers have low-power modes to generate an interrupt when movement is detected. That's probably what Google is using here (and only switching to higher-power modes when there's movement).

marcsto2•7h ago

It only runs when a phone is plugged in and stationary.

irvymike•7h ago

All your questions/assumptions are answered in the linked paper supplementary material: 50hz, 3 axis, only when charging. Accompanied with actual sample plots for various distances from epicenter, showing p waves and s waves.

CommenterPerson•8h ago

Company that tracks people to send them ads wants you to sign up for some 10 year old technology for .. saving lives!

nosioptar•5h ago

It would be great, if I had any reason to trust google.

It'd be cool if they'd partner with governments to send the alerts out through the same means as amber alerts and such.

ezst•6h ago

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.

zoom6628•6h ago

A few years back I was woken by a shake in HongKong. To confirm was a quake I found my Android phone and sure enough Google had registered a quake. It was one far inland and <5 IIRC. Creepiness or not as someone who helped after Sichuan 2008 quake these kind of systems can save lives.

petschge•6h ago

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/723/

mvdtnz•6h ago

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.

incompatible•55m ago

So the use cases like "get down from a ladder" aren't really likely to be achieved in real life? When I'm working on a ladder, I'm not going to be checking phone notifications anyway.

IG_Semmelweiss•5h ago

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...

marcsto2•5h ago

Receiving alerts should be on by default as long as you're in one of the supported countries. You can verify by going to settings, safety and emergency, earthquake alerts.

mrheosuper•2h ago

Thanks, looklike i'm not in supported region :(

Sxubas•4h ago

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.

tiagod•4h ago

Last time we had a reasonably powerful one in Portugal, I grabbed my phone the house was still shaking and it already had the Android warning!

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.

ada1981•2h ago

Is there a way to get alerts or contribute data with IOS?

hulitu•28m ago

> Android Earthquake Alerts: A global system for early warning

Fixing bugs in Google products is no fun. Better make something else what nobody needs.

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Comments

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