Chris Davies - Apr 28, 2021, 12:00pm CDT
Android’s Earthquake Alerts System is spreading beyond the US for the first time, bringing both detection and warnings using Android smartphones for potentially dangerous quakes. The expansion will begin in Greece and New Zealand, Google says, neither of which currently have early warning alert systems.
The Android Earthquake Alerts System launched last year, with Google working with the United States Geological Survey (USGS). It relies on the accelerometers commonplace in Android smartphones to track seismic waves: if the phone believes that the shaking it’s recording could be from an earthquake, that data is passed to Google’s servers along with a course record of the phone’s location at the time.
Android earthquake alerts are now live in Greece and New Zealand Engadget 10 hrs ago Saqib Shah
The ubiquity of smartphones has turned them into essential tools for emergency services. Google s Android, the world s most popular mobile operating system, is already being used to disseminate disaster alerts in Japan and by law enforcement to help locate 911 callers. Due to the critical nature of these features, they tend to be baked into the software to avoid the complexity of pushing people to additional apps.
Building on the safety mechanisms of its OS, Google introduced an Android Earthquake Alerts System last summer in partnership with the United States Geological Survey. Launched in California, the feature has since been rolled out to Oregon and is heading to Washington in May. But, it s also now taking its first steps outside of the US to Greece and New Zealand two countries that are prone to earthquakes, but lack an early warning system.
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The Android Earthquake Alerts System that Google launched last year as a warning system to let people know that an earthquake is happening in their location, is expanding both inside and outside the US.
Google announced today that Greece and New Zealand are getting access to the Android Earthquake Alert System, which will use detection and alerts capabilities. Once live in those two countries, Google will use accelerometers inside phones to detect seismic waves before sending alerts near the location of a possible quake.
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