I live in a seismically active (and poor) area. Dunk on Google all you want, they're the only organization who provide earthquake alerts in my area. The government has better things to spend money on (like pervasive corruption), but Google usually sends a notification 30-60 seconds before a perceptible earthquake happens.
Note that they're also one of the only ones who can unilaterally choose to preinstall this on a majority of devices around the world. Of course I agree that it's good that they do it, for free and all, but to put it in perspective it's either each government for themselves or one of the two global superpowers that have devices with accelerometers and constant internet connectivity on every square kilometer of this oblate spheroid
Google (and Apple) has been partnering with ShakeAlert from USGS for quake reporting on west coast of US. But that takes network of seismometers and detection system.
I could see smartphone seismometers being useful for areas that don't have all that. OTOH, if phones are useful seismometers, it should be possible to make cheap, dedicated ones.
The closest one (that I know of) is approximately 1000 km away, and it does provide data about earthquakes, but only after the fact. They already have some information sharing, because I usually look up the info on usgs.gov, but almost certainly not in real time.
We’ve had this Google service in El Salvador for a while, and it’s really cool. The first time we received an earthquake alarm we felt like we were living in Japan. I never thought we would have Japanese-style earthquake alerts here.
iPhone users were a bit annoyed though, because it only worked on Android phones.
