Okay, that's very interesting, thank you for linking the articles.

So it isn't that the accelerometers or myshake work flawlessly, it's that the earthquake detection systems we have now are so rare in countries that at least crowdsourced earthquake detection using phones is better than the no-warning-at-all that most of the world has.

And since with so many accelerometers, some number of them are going to detect an active earthquake, they're able to relay that information to those potentially soon-to-be affected. That is pretty cool.

Seems like a bad move for Google to announce that alert service without any disclaimers about efficacy knowing that quakes will occur but myshake or whatever equivalent service they're using is only potentially effective before the quake hits.