3 in 5 users trust their earthquake early warning apps
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With the first anniversary of the East Japan Great Earthquake Disaster approaching, with various predictions of Tokyo being due a Big One, and with smartphones now supporting earthquake early warnings straight out of the box, I would think that the awareness of such early warning systems should be high, but the article from japan.internet.com on a survey by goo Research into earthquake early warning applications didn’t report that figure, unfortunately.
Demographics
Between the 23rd and 25th of February 2012 1,066 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.8% of the sample were male, 16.0% in their teens, 17.7% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.6% in their forties, 16.1% in their fifties, and 12.1% aged sixty or older.
The app that I most hear people talking about is yurekuru for the iPhone. Fortunately, down here in Kansai there have been few significant shakers recently so I’ve never heard the alerts personally, but I read about many Tokyo residents who talk about whole roomfuls of people’s smartphones going off at the same time – there must be a YouTube video, and indeed there is, but just of a single phone:
Research results
Of the sample, 22.6%, or 241 people, said they were currently using an earthquake early warning application, and another 3.4% said they used to. However, how many of the remaining 74.0% were unaware of such apps and how many just hadn’t installed is not reported. Note that as mentioned above, most new smartphones and conventional phones support early warnings without the need for an explicit app to be installed, but there is no indication whether the 241 people here include those with in-built support.
The 241 current users were asked on what device or devices they currently used these applications. 50.2% had it on Android or iPhone smartphones, and 39.8% had it on conventional feature phones. Others used standard Windows or Mac computers, and there may have been yet more with such apps on tablets or other more exotic devices, but these numbers were again unreported.
Q1: How reliable is your earthquake early warning application? (Sample size=241)
Completely reliable 7.1% Reliable 55.6% Can’t say either way 32.4% Unreliable 4.6% Completely unreliable 0.4%
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The area message alerts for earthquakes, tsunami, and typhoon emergencies, etc is reasonable enough. Sometimes there are false positives and sometimes it doesn’t go off at all but in general it is decent in Tokyo.
The 3rd party apps (as opposed to carrier ones baked into their feature phone OSs) are not as good as it seems they often rely on channels of information for reporting quakes rather than actually warning about quakes.