Google(and others) marketed these alerts as features of their product, as one of the reasons to upgrade a smartphone from a feature phone.
Median price of phone went from couple of hundred in Nokia era to a thousand or more today, justified by all the features including this one , meaning they certainly made money of providing all these value added services.
It’s no different from a fire or burglar alarm . Yes they are not substitutes for the police and fire departments .
However the alarm company cannot turn around and say you shouldn’t depend on us. The government shouldn’t depend/expect them to do anything for emergencies yes but buyers of their product can.
IF a company sold a product and advertised features for it, then it is a problem when said features don’t work especially when said features are designed around emergencies.
It is actually worse than that. The product manager of this feature claimed that the system worked on both earthquakes and when he was asked why people say they didn’t get this alert he basically said “people probably didn’t notice the alerts due to the severity of the event” (https://youtu.be/z-KjVQJ7XKE?si=xwHuholLJV9xjBov). I know Google would be pretty down the list of those responsible for the effects of these earthquakes but they did misinform the public.
I think there's a reason you had no idea, and the reason is that Google didn't even try to use this for marketing. They also shipped it to existing phones, they didn't market it as a differentiating feature of new ones.
Median price of phone went from couple of hundred in Nokia era to a thousand or more today, justified by all the features including this one , meaning they certainly made money of providing all these value added services.
It’s no different from a fire or burglar alarm . Yes they are not substitutes for the police and fire departments .
However the alarm company cannot turn around and say you shouldn’t depend on us. The government shouldn’t depend/expect them to do anything for emergencies yes but buyers of their product can.
IF a company sold a product and advertised features for it, then it is a problem when said features don’t work especially when said features are designed around emergencies.