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"
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
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.
I don't get it. I thought earthquake alerts were meant to trigger _before_ the earthquake arrives. If it happens 30 secondes after detecting vibrations, not considering the false positive, it can only mean "hey, you just felt, or are feeling an earthquake, hope you're sheltered".
Somewhat relatedly, I support a service with global scale traffic. Whenever there's an earthquake in APAC, we get a traffic spike, like 100x normal for that time of night. I'm pretty sure it's incoming alerts waking people up / checking where the epicenter is and if they need to run from any tsunami or flooding, but it's still really hard to scale that kind of thing up for regional demand when it spikes that hard!
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.
No ads, no creepy monetization angle (at least not yet), just a genuinely useful system that leverages something only Google could realistically pull off. Feels rare these days, but really nice to see.
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.
> "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."
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 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.
yeah I've ran into bunch of people who were scared for real and drove up to higher elevation in the middle of the night.
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.
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.
Pretty impressive use of existing infrastructure for public safety. Turning billions of smartphones into a global seismometer network is one of those "why didn't we do this sooner?" ideas. Sure, it's not a replacement for dedicated seismic systems, but when most of the world doesn’t have access to those anyway, this feels like a huge leap forward
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.
I've only ever experienced a big earthquake once, which was in Bangkok a couple of months ago. And if I had known it was an earthquake, I probably would've reacted differently. Not knowing what was happening, and genuinely thinking my building was about to collapse on top of me was one of the scariest feelings in my life.
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.
- 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
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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).
Had a fun experience of receiving "EARTHQUAKE ALERT. THERE WILL BE SHAKING. IT WILL BE STRONG" jolting me out of a deep slumber in Japan at 3am on a recent vacation. My wife asks the question on both of our minds: "here? back home? is there anything heavy over the bed?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
The most useless detection system because you are either fine or buried under rubble at that point. Every real detection system attempts to catch the p-waves to warn users in real time ahead of shaking.
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.
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.
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.
irvymike|7 months ago
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|7 months ago
Aachen|7 months ago
dheera|7 months ago
The whole country moving phones in random directions at exactly the same time isn't what an earthquake signature should look like.
Galanwe|7 months ago
jldugger|7 months ago
CGMthrowaway|7 months ago
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]
HexPhantom|7 months ago
unixhero|7 months ago
ezst|7 months ago
HexPhantom|7 months ago
jedilance|7 months ago
zoom6628|7 months ago
perihelions|7 months ago
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.
seydor|7 months ago
HexPhantom|7 months ago
tiagod|7 months ago
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.
miduil|7 months ago
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.
srameshc|7 months ago
HexPhantom|7 months ago
HexPhantom|7 months ago
mvdtnz|7 months ago
woutr_be|7 months ago
incompatible|7 months ago
Aachen|7 months ago
- 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|7 months ago
[1] https://sismo.app
Rebelgecko|7 months ago
chrini3930|7 months ago
Why not?
You can use router IP address for location and WiFi to send. Minimal power consumption.
londons_explore|7 months ago
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!
irvymike|7 months ago
duskwuff|7 months ago
marcsto2|7 months ago
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]
exabrial|7 months ago
As always.
drjasonharrison|7 months ago
Google "AI search" results claim that because Canada has its own early warning system, Android Earthquake Alerts aren't available in Canada.
Sxubas|7 months ago
rconti|7 months ago
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.
ada1981|7 months ago
IvyMike|7 months ago
jerojero|7 months ago
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...
ianburrell|7 months ago
Tracking social would be useful for plotting where quake was felt.
robochat|7 months ago
[1] https://www.usgs.gov/media/audio/shaking-and-tweeting-usgs-t...
nemomarx|7 months ago
https://scistarter.org/the-twitter-earthquake-detection-prog...
I did find this and some papers that seem related
alright2565|7 months ago
delfinom|7 months ago
BimJeam|7 months ago
yard2010|7 months ago
bravesoul2|7 months ago
potato-peeler|7 months ago
Enabling location settings is a global configuration. Can’t this be configured just for this purpose?
neurostimulant|7 months ago
IG_Semmelweiss|7 months ago
Is it by default on ? How can i check if its actually working ?
So many questions! None detailed in the article...
marcsto2|7 months ago
mnky9800n|7 months ago
DrNosferatu|7 months ago
Really curious to know.
DrNosferatu|7 months ago
petschge|7 months ago
CommenterPerson|7 months ago
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]
nosioptar|7 months ago
It'd be cool if they'd partner with governments to send the alerts out through the same means as amber alerts and such.
hulitu|7 months ago
Fixing bugs in Google products is no fun. Better make something else what nobody needs.
fusionadvocate|7 months ago
So the company notorious for killing projects is going to tackle infrastructure grade systems? I don't trust Google to tackle this problem.
homebrewer|7 months ago
kccqzy|7 months ago
bitpush|7 months ago
Always curious why people comment like this when they have a choice to, you know, not do it