Reasons Behind Android’s Earthquake Alert System Failure in India

Tuesday’s big earthquake was the perfect way to test the new Android earthquake alert system in India this week. The incident was reported in Nepal at around 14:51 IST and ideally the alarm should have beeped but no one got the notification on their Android phone. So why didn’t Google warn users about the earthquake today?

This is because the alert system is not supported in India as of now, although Google officially shared an update about its availability in the country last week.

You can access the earthquake alert from your Android smartphone’s emergency settings, which are available on most of the latest Android phones. You’ll notice that the earthquake alert feature is enabled by default, but the small note below explains the feature’s inability to notify you of an earthquake. As you can see here, the app settings say that alerts are not available and not supported in this region, which in this case is India.

Google even explains how the feature works, but it comes with a number of riders, including not being able to detect all earthquakes, errors in earthquake magnitude estimates, and the strength of the tremors. This Android Earthquake Alerts System was released in collaboration with National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and National Center for Seismology (NCS) under Ministry of Earth Sciences.

So when Google announced an earthquake alert in India, why didn’t it warn users? The simple answer is that the rollout of the feature appears to be gradual, which could take weeks to roll out in the country.

The earthquake on Tuesday was a little too early for Google to show what its earthquake warning can do for Android phone users.

Despite this, many people saw the alert online, which doesn’t inspire much confidence because no one is going to look for an earthquake until it actually happens. The company even has a demo version of how this alert will appear on the screen of your smartphone, but it seems that the implementation is not quite ready yet. Maybe next time Google will have systems to warn people.