One of the worst facts of life in Ukraine right now is the air raid alert system. While the Ukrainian government has an air raid warning system that currently runs through a third-party app, it is not the only one. The decision was outlined on the company's website.
Tragically, millions of people in Ukraine now rely on air strike alerts to try to get to safety. At the request, and with the help, of the government of Ukraine, we've started rolling out a rapid Air Raid Alerts system for Android phones in Ukraine. This work is supplemental to the country's existing air raid alert systems, and based on alerts already being delivered by the Ukrainian government.
The feature should work for nearly every phone in the world, because it is being rolled out via the Play Services. The only way to get an update for everyone is through the Play Store, since the only way to get an update for a single-digit percentage of users is through the OS.
Android's VP of Engineering, Dave Burke, announced the new feature on Twitter, saying the alerts use the same low-latency alert system the Android team designed for Android's earthquake detection. While the Earthquake detection system can spawn an earthquake alert of its own by crowdsourcing the accelerometer data from millions of Android phones, Google isn't detecting air raids and is just building a client for the government's alert system.The system starts rolling out today and will ramp up to target all of the phones in the country over the next few days. We are thankful to our eng/product/UX teams for racing to get to a solution.
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