Support
Answers to the questions we expect most. If yours is not here, write to us.
Include your iPhone model, iOS version and the app version from Settings.
In an emergency, call your local emergency number. Magnitude is a supplement to official warnings and cannot send help.
Warnings
A warning reaches Magnitude only when Google alerted Android phones near your chosen place and a volunteer phone running Quake Proxy was there to catch it. Google does not alert for every earthquake, the volunteer network is small, and a warning that cannot be delivered within a minute is dropped rather than shown late.
Check two things in the app's Settings, under Warnings: that Your place is set to where you are, and that notifications are allowed (Open notification settings). Then tell us what happened. Reports like yours are how we find gaps.
A warning (Act now or Heads up) is relayed from Google's Android Earthquake Alerts System while the earthquake is happening. It may arrive before the shaking, with it or after it.
An earthquake notification comes from a catalog, SGC or USGS, after they publish the earthquake, usually minutes later. It tells you what happened. It is not an early warning, never opens the warning screen and never uses Critical Alerts.
A warning caught by a volunteer phone is true of the place that phone is. Magnitude relays it to people whose chosen place is near enough: close by as Act now, farther away as Heads up. Without a place, the app has nothing to match and you receive no warnings.
Choose it under Settings, Warnings, Your place: search for a town, use your location once, or drag the map. The app saves the spot to about a kilometre and does not follow you, so if you move house or travel for a long time, change it.
Wherever volunteer phones run Quake Proxy, which today means Colombia. The region in Settings is a label and a filter for the earthquake list; it does not decide which warnings you get. Earthquake notifications from the catalogs work anywhere in the world.
Turn on Critical Alerts in the app's Settings and accept the prompt iOS shows. An Act now warning can then sound through silent mode and Focus. Heads up warnings, test alerts and earthquake notifications never do. You can turn it off in the same place at any time.
Turn on Receive test alerts in Settings. When a volunteer phone near your place sends a test, it arrives labelled TEST, on a neutral screen and with the standard sound, so it cannot be mistaken for a real warning. There is no schedule for tests.
Earthquake notifications and the list
Open Settings, then Earthquake notifications. Choose worldwide, or a place and a radius from 10 to 2,000 km, and the smallest magnitude you care about. They are off until you turn them on. The place stays where you put it; the app does not follow you.
SGC publishes a preliminary solution first and a reviewed one later. Magnitude sends the first, marked as preliminary, and then updates it quietly when the review arrives. Magnitude and location can change between the two.
Agencies compute magnitude from different stations and methods, and revise it as data arrives. Magnitude shows what SGC and USGS publish, names the source on every earthquake and adds nothing of its own.
The app
An iPhone with iOS 17 or later. The app is in English and Spanish. It is in private beta on TestFlight and is not on the App Store yet. There is no Android version yet; one is planned.
Nothing. There are no ads, no purchases and no account to create.
Turn off Earthquake notifications in the app, or turn off notifications for Magnitude in iOS Settings. Deleting the app ends delivery: once Apple reports the push token as no longer valid, our server stops using it.
To have your registration deleted from our server, write to us. The privacy policy explains what we hold and how deletion works.
Possibly. Quake Proxy runs on an Android phone in Colombia that stays charged and online, and it shares the phone's approximate location, to about a kilometre and only the latest one, so that a warning it catches goes to people near it. It is not publicly distributed yet. Write to us and say where the phone would be.