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"
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.
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
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".
A faster moving small quake (p-wave) will precede the bigger, more damaging quake. This system detects the p-wave and alert people hoping they can get out in time before the big quake hit.
This is when the earthquake is a few hundred kilometers away, such as in Mexico City, where most earthquakes occur off the coast and the waves take a few minutes to reach the city.
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.
Nowadays I just assume these "nice to have" features exist in order to get users to enable location services so that they can be permanently tracked. Very cynical of me maybe. But there's never an option to "enable location sevices for this use only"-kind of setting. It's always the globally enabled one.
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.
Readit News
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.
Deleted Comment
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?