Google has added a new worldwide earthquake detection system to its Android devices, adding an alert feature to phones for California as well.
What’s happening?
- Google released a slew of updates to its Android software Thursday, including a new Android Auto hub and Android emergency location services, according to TechCrunch. Devices will now have updated bedtime tools, too.
- Google included a new earthquake detection system with an alert feature added to California.
- The feature turns your Android into a seismometer.
How it works:
- According to TechCrunch, Google has made it so that the phone can measure P-waves when they arrive from earthquakes.
- When the phone thinks there’s been an earthquake, the phone sends data to a server to determine if it was a real one (or if it was just me standing up after sitting at a Marvel movie marathon for three days).
- Google will use this data to show someone updated information if they searched for earthquake news. Eventually, the company hopes to turn this into an alert system.
It’d be great if there were just seismometer-based systems everywhere that could detect earthquakes. But that’s not really practical and it’s unlikely to have global coverage because seismometers are extremely expensive. They have to be constantly maintained, you need a lot of them in an area to really have a good earthquake early warning system. — Marc Stogaitis, principal Android software engineer at Google, to The Verge.