This is really cool, and it smells like old-school Google, in a good way, like "let's do this because we can". It feels like it's been a while since something coming out of Google Engineering is meaningful and not designed to unlock new existential creeps, so, well done I guess.
No ads, no creepy monetization angle (at least not yet), just a genuinely useful system that leverages something only Google could realistically pull off. Feels rare these days, but really nice to see.
Nowadays I just assume these "nice to have" features exist in order to get users to enable location services so that they can be permanently tracked. Very cynical of me maybe. But there's never an option to "enable location sevices for this use only"-kind of setting. It's always the globally enabled one.
Cynical: People who makes decisions at Google push for features that trick people into enabling system-wide always-on location services that they otherwise wouldn't. For functionality that shouldn't actually require system-wide always-on location services. The primary goal being to sell more ads, not to help with earthquakes.
A conspiracy: Governments push or force or encourage Google to do it in order to have access to location data on citizens.
A few years back I was woken by a shake in HongKong. To confirm was a quake I found my Android phone and sure enough Google had registered a quake. It was one far inland and <5 IIRC. Creepiness or not as someone who helped after Sichuan 2008 quake these kind of systems can save lives.
