Electronic messages travel faster than seismic waves, [1]Gizmodo points out — meaning some people near an earthquake receive an Android Earthquake Alert "before the seismic waves reach them — and even a few seconds could be just enough time to hide under a table or run outside."

Richard Allen from the University of California in Berkeley's Seismological Laboratory, [2]writes in a new study that "The global adoption of smartphone technology places sophisticated sensing and alerting capabilities in people's hands, in both the wealthy and less-wealthy portions of the planet."

[3]From Gizmodo :

> According to the study, 70% of the world's smartphones are Android phones, which by default come with the aforementioned sensing and alerting capabilities. From 2021 to 2024, the Android Earthquake Alert (AEA) system detected an average of 312 earthquakes per month across 98 countries. The earthquakes had a magnitude between 1.9 and 7.8, and the system alerted users of earthquakes at or over a magnitude of 4.5, averaging around 60 events and 18 million alerts per month. The AEA system also collected user feedback, revealing that 85% of users who received alerts experienced shaking, with 36% receiving the alert before, 28% during, and 23% after the shaking began...

>

> "AEA demonstrates that globally distributed smartphones can be used to detect earthquakes and issue warnings at scale with an effectiveness comparable to established national systems," the researchers wrote.

The system detected 11,231 earthquakes between April of 2021 and March of 2024, according to the study, which notes that the length of the advanced warning "ranged from seconds up to a minute" for moderate shaking, and about 15 seconds for the strongest shaking.



[1] https://gizmodo.com/android-phones-can-detect-earthquakes-before-the-ground-starts-shaking-2000629636

[2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads4779

[3] https://gizmodo.com/android-phones-can-detect-earthquakes-before-the-ground-starts-shaking-2000629636