Many social media users in Venezuela reported receiving alerts on Android smartphones moments before Wednesday’s earthquake with more than 900 confirmed deaths.
Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS include the option to display government alerts for emergencies such as earthquakes.
But last year the search giant also detailed its system that uses billions of Android smartphones around the world to detect earthquakes in the first place.
how it works
Almost all smartphones contain an accelerometer, a motion sensor used for tasks such as rotating the screen when users turn it sideways.
That same sensor “can also detect ground shaking due to an earthquake,” Google wrote in a July 2025 blog post.
Accelerometers can detect the initial, fast-moving “P” wave of potential earthquakes, sending information about the shaking to a Google server.
By quickly comparing many of these reports, the system can “confirm that an earthquake is occurring and estimate its location and magnitude,” Google said.
“The goal is to warn as many people as possible before the slower, more damaging S wave of an earthquake reaches them.”
Google offers two stages of alerts.
“BeAware” warns of weaker tremors, while for stronger earthquakes, “TakeAction” takes over the screen and plays a loud sound even when the phone is in silent mode.
How effective is the system?
Google said last year that its systems had already sent 790 million alerts to individual phones, warning of more than 2,000 potentially dangerous earthquakes detected since April 2021.
While this gives many more people access to early warning information than before, there have been setbacks.
Android phones did not issue warnings before the devastating February 2023 earthquakes that killed nearly 60,000 people in Turkiye and Syria.
Google said last year that it has since updated its algorithms to prevent a repeat.
The company also apologized in February 2025 for a false alarm sent to some Android users in Brazil.
This week in Venezuela, hundreds of people posted praise for Google on X, and some included unverified videos of alerts prompting people to leave buildings.
What’s wrong with Apple?
Beyond government warnings, Apple says on its website that users in the US and Taiwan may also receive alerts from other earthquake “alert generators.”
The company did not respond AFPQuestions about how that system works at the time of publication.
The iPhone giant also hasn’t included its users’ phones in a distributed discovery system like Google’s.
However, the hundreds of millions of iPhones around the world can forward the alerts they receive to other nearby Apple devices that do not have cellular reception or WiFi connection, potentially helping life-saving warnings be transmitted.
