[quietthrow]

Interesting observation: I am in a circumstance where I am transitioning from an Android phone (Samsung Galaxy) to a iPhone. I observed that android phone alerted me about an earthquake and that I should be ready to feel tremors. To my surprise as I was pondering how this system works - especially wrt to latency - where it alerts me head of time, I then fell small tremors in 2 or 3 seconds after the alert. The tremors were very small and I would not have noticed it if it weren’t for the alert. ~10 (may 15 minutes) later, the IPhone gave a tsunami warning which I take it was due to the earthquake.

What I was surprised by is how behind the iPhone was. I expected iPhone to be on par with android in terms of safety alerts.

Anybody know if there is a way to get the early alerts on iPhone like I did on the android phone?

In general my impression of Android is that it’s quite ‘leaky’ and apps can abuse it quite easily and iPhone is more secure. Would love to hear thoughts on this or point me to resources that address this question.

[numpad0]

LTE ETWS/PWS is mandatory feature, iPhones has the same thing. Maybe you've explicitly disabled it, considering (IIUC) US used it for AMBER alerts and had annoyed lots of people at some point.

Generally an earthquake warnings are issued by someone always automatically correlating sensors everywhere, USGS and/or NOAA in case with US, and then cellular carriers broadcasting the alert through LTE feature. This does not work without participating local equivalent of USGS deploying a sensor network and running its computers wired to carriers.

This feature is carrier agnostic, enabled by default, and mandatory on phones; it's specifically designed to deliver earthquake early warnings. It does not matter if it's Android, iOS, or something else altogether. Any phones, SIM locked or unlocked, with or without SIM, should start blaring the alert so long it hears the signal.

ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_Broadcast

[kccqzy]

I think OP is describing a different feature. It's not a carrier feature like Amber alerts but an OS feature. Google documents this feature here: https://crisisresponse.google/android-alerts/ I'm fairly certain this is due to some Android-specific code inside GMSCore. It has nothing to do with carriers.

On iOS you have no such thing and you either rely on the carrier alert (there won't always be one) or install an earthquake alert app such as MyShake.

[Rebelgecko]

The wireless emergency alerts (like what you see for amber alerts) that go over cell towers have pretty high latency (IIRC on the order of a minute or two for the alert to disseminate). The native Android earthquake alerts are much faster

[numpad0]

Carrier alerts is the fastest. Not only the whole process from detecting tremors to alerts take 30 seconds or so, there aren't other data sources than what those carriers use anyway, so there's just no way Google can be faster than carriers.

PWS is also a broadcast, meaning the phones don't have to wait for cellular timeslots, so it's faster and bandwidth efficient in that regard too.

[jcrawfordor]

Unfortunately the architecture of IPAWS can introduce fairly long delays. The EEWS system uses a dedicated channel to deliver alerts to WEA more quickly, since a study by USGS/NIST had determined that IPAWS could not meet time objectives (typically ~5 minutes end to end). The tsunami warning center, like basically everyone except for USGS, has to originate alerts through IPAWS. The performance and latency problems with IPAWS have been flagged by GAO a couple of times now but it's not something that receives much investment. All-Hazards Radio (weather radio) should actually be a faster alerting mechanism for tsunamis, in practice, since NOAA operates that system themselves.

The Android Alerts are actually coming off of IPAWS as well, but I believe they take a feed directly from the publishing system and do all of the routing themselves. Their implementation is of course quite a bit faster than IPAWS rather creaky and sort of batch-centric architecture.

[Bratmon]

Android alerts got there way before carrier alerts today.

Reality doesn't care what you think should be the fastest.

[Melatonic]

When I was on Android the integrated Google system was always much faster than anything else

[int0x29]

I got shake alert via google play services. I have amber alerts on. I have gotten earthquake alerts over WEA in the past. I did not get one this time. I am pretty sure one was not issued for the 6.9 magnitude quake just the tsunami

[mgsouth]

For folks jumping on saying "that's not a carrier thing". All comms are a carrier thing. Whether it's ETWS, SMS, or IP, it's going through the carrier, they process it, and they do extensive traffic management. Carriers absolutely can and will inspect, proxy, aggregate, and do anything else that will tease out another few % of "free" capacity.

[Edit:] All too real scenario: Carrier knows about particular IP addresses and ports used by alert service. Carrier makes provision for separate path for it. Carrier also tries to shave said provisioning to the bone, calculates a worst-case, and adds 5% capacity. Which doesn't get updated when that particular app gets a 6% boost in subscriptions. Back in the old days the traffic management folks would be on top if it, but that's all been outsourced...

[sib]

In this case, there is a separate service that Google developed for early warning.

(Source, worked at Google in Android team.)

[numpad0]

PWS is tower based broadcast. Everyone within range of a tower gets the alert. Data source is supposed to be local government weather authority, I think USGS and NOAA in US. Or the Meteorological Agency in Japan.

You can do a location-based two way warning system and there are such services, but it's going to be laggy and won't scale to 100M+ simultaneous subscribers. One-way broadcast scales to the planet if wanted.

[mort96]

It doesn't sound like the iPhone was behind, but rather warning about something else? It's interesting that Android didn't warn about the tsunami at all, even though that sounds more important than the barely noticable tremors you describe.

[gamblor956]

Why would the Android give a notification for a tsunami that never happened?

Androids also give tsunami warnings, when appropriate. There was 1 issued just a few weeks ago after an off-shore earthquake in SoCal.

[powersnail]

My Android did give me a tsunami warning this morning though, but no earthquake warning.

[lern_too_spel]

The tsunami warning was in effect all the way down to Santa Cruz. The earthquake alert is sent only if you are expected to experience some particular level of shaking or higher in your location.

[trial3]

The Verge's Vergecast podcast did a pretty in-depth story in the second half of an episode about this that was fascinating [0]

tldl: I do think the recommendation was installing the official ShakeAlert app

[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/mu/podcast/two-possible-futures-f...

[mgsouth]

It varies, a lot, and depends upon a lot of things. I'm not current on all the current details, but many moons ago was involved in push notification development.

* Notification path. IoS at the time was pretty protective of the user's battery, and had specific services you had to use. I imagine there's special treatment now for emergency communications.

* Phone state. How deeply asleep is it? Are there other background apps frequently contacting the mothership? Multiple apps can get their requests batched together, so as to minimize phone wake-ups. You can also benefit from greedy apps--VoIP apps, for example, might be allowed/figured out a hack to allow frequent check-ins, and the other apps might see a latency benefit.

* Garbage carriers. Hopefully emergency alerts have a separate path, but I've noticed my provider (who shall remain nameless but is a three-letter acronym with an ampersand in the middle) sometimes delays SMS messages by tens of minutes. (TBF, in my case there might also be a phone problem [Android], but since nameless provider forced it on me when they went 4G-only they're still getting the blame.)

In your case, my money would be on the carrier. Pushing a notification to all phones in an area can be taxing, and cheaping out on infrastructure is very much a thing.

For docs, your best bet would be to go to the developer sites and pull up the "thou shalt..." rules, particularly regarding network activity, push notification, and permitted background activities. And yeah, Apple was much more dictatorial, for good reasons.

[dylan604]

> a three-letter acronym with an ampersand in the middle

wasn't the official name switched to no longer use that ampersand so it is just the three letters now (and for some time)?

[toast0]

I believe they did announce that, and also claim that the letters no longer mean anything (which makes sense as telegraph is long dead, and the telephone network is primarily spam), however their website including investor relations has the ampersand everywhere, so maybe they backpedaled.

Or maybe ampersand was dropped before SBC bought the remaining parts of the old business and reformed T-1000 with the ampersand?

[dylan604]

I thought that was when they dropped the ampersand when the biggest baby bell bought the remain baby bells to reform the mothership but couldn't use the ampersand since that was the entity that got broken up in the first place. You can't be too obvious about it and flaunt it in everyone's face. Subtlety is an art. And that art is clearly lost on the FTC

[tshaddox]

Sounds like it could have just been a quirk. I've had a couple of iPhone earthquake alerts around 0-2 seconds before feeling it, so it's definitely not a general problem with iPhones. I've also had many more of the AMBER alerts and test broadcast alerts where everyone in the room receives them at the same instant regardless of phone manufacturer.

[JCharante]

I'm not sure what you need to configure, but you can definitely get iPhone alerts to arrive before you feel the earthquake. Not sure why your iPhone didn't alert you while your android did as it should be from the same local data source.

I really wish we had something like NERV but for SF, NERV works so well whenever I'm in Japan. It will literally show you a countdown of exactly when you'll feel it and it's very accurate, and you can see a livemap of monitoring stations reporting it in real time as the wave makes its way towards you.

[HuoKnight]

I have an android (pixel 7), and I got not alert for earthquake or tsunami. IOS users around me got alerted for the magnitude 7, not entirely sure about the tsunami

[therein]

My iPhone was 3-4 minutes behind my Android device on this one.

[eek2121]

I use carrot weather with the critical alerts feature on the iPhone. It works great.

[Ancapistani]

Sigh.

I've lost 15 minutes already because of your comment, and am on track to lose CARROT only knows how much more.

Not only did you prompt me to download CARROT weather, I was foolish enough to set it on the "overkill" personality setting. I was amused by the banter until I found the "achievements" section. Then I saw that there was an achievement for downloading the Vision Pro app, so of course I had to get that one.

I thought it was going to be difficult resisting enslaving myself to the will of CARROT on my iPad... woo boy. I wasn't prepared for the Neal Stephenson-flavored counterfeit GLaDOS that awaited me in visionOS.

[whimsicalism]

i've also observed android to be consistently faster on these alerts

[dekhn]

google maintains an open TCP connection on every android device (IIRC it's part of GMSCore) which allows them to push to phones with extremely low latency.

[raggi]

yep, the iphone is comparably terrible in this area, even with the myshake app