How Android phones alerted some Venezuelans before the earthquake

CARACAS: Social media users in Venezuela said they received alerts on Android smartphones moments before Wednesday’s earthquake, which has left more than 900 people confirmed dead.

Both Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS allow emergency alerts from governments for events such as earthquakes. Google has also described a separate Android-based system that uses smartphones themselves to help detect earthquakes.

How the Android detection system works

Google said in a July 2025 blog post that nearly all smartphones contain an accelerometer, a motion sensor commonly used for functions such as rotating a screen when a device is turned sideways. The company said that sensor can also pick up ground movement caused by an earthquake.

Google explained that accelerometers can detect the fast-moving initial P wave of a possible quake and send that information to a Google server. By comparing many such reports quickly, the system can verify whether an earthquake is taking place and estimate where it is happening and how strong it is.

Google said the purpose of the system is to issue warnings before the slower and more destructive S-wave arrives. The company offers two levels of alerts: BeAware for weaker shaking, and TakeAction for stronger earthquakes. The latter can take over the phone’s screen and emit a loud sound even if the device is set to silent.

Scale, limitations and recent response

Google said last year that the system had sent 790 million alerts to individual phones for more than 2,000 potentially dangerous earthquakes detected since April 2021. While this has broadened access to early warning information, the system has also faced problems.

Android phones did not issue warnings before the February 2023 earthquakes in Turkey and Syria that killed nearly 60,000 people. Google said last year it had updated its algorithms after that failure. The company also apologised in February 2025 after some Android users in Brazil received a false alarm.

In Venezuela this week, hundreds of users posted messages praising Google on X. Some also shared unverified videos showing alerts that they said prompted people to evacuate buildings.

Apple’s approach

Apple says on its website that, in addition to government alerts, users in the United States and Taiwan can receive earthquake warnings from other alert originators. The company did not respond to AFP’s questions by the time of publication about how that arrangement works.

Apple has not built a distributed earthquake detection network using users’ phones in the way Google has. However, iPhones can pass along alerts they receive to other nearby Apple devices that lack mobile reception or a WiFi connection, which could help warnings reach more users.