Android Smartphone users receive alert seconds before earthquake, Sundar Pichai reacts with a screenshot

Earthquakes are one of the scariest accidents that no one wants to experience in life. A moment of vigilance before an earthquake can also be a lifesaver. Recently, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake was felt near California’s San Jose, and some Android smartphone users received an alert shortly before the incident.

The California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services said up to 1,00,000 people had received text messages before the quake.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai was also among those who received notices before the quake. “Warning went out just before, feels like a long alarm, hope everyone is fine,” the Google CEO tweeted. He even shared screenshots of the earthquake announcement in his post. In addition to Sundar Pichai, Google’s Dieter Bohn said in his tweet, “Getting an earthquake alert on my Android phone seconds before I felt it.”

According to Android Authority, Dave Burke, Google’s vice president of engineering for Android, tweeted a neat visualization showing countless Android phones detecting earthquakes before the shockwave hit.

“Earthquake in the SF Bay Area today. The yellow/red color represents the shaking of the Android phone acting as a seismometer. The circles are our inferred estimate of the P and S waves. Earthquake alerts are sent instantly to surrounding phones before a wave hits,” he wrote on Twitter.

The notifications that various users receive regarding the earthquake are due to the My Shake app. Application developed by the University of California, Berkeley. The MyShake app can be installed on iPhone as well as Android and it provides a few seconds of earthquake warning before it happens. However, when Google announced in 2020 that it would use the University’s technology directly into Android devices, many people benefited from it.

Similarly, the northern Philippines reported an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.7 on Tuesday night, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said.