STORY: Demand is surging across Taiwan for home-grown earthquake monitoring apps, after the island experienced its strongest earthquake in a quarter of a century in April.
And then more than 1,300 tremors and aftershocks continued to rattle Taiwan over the past month.
This app, showing tremors in real-time across Taiwan, their intensity, as well as information from the authorities, is the creation of students 17-year-old Lin Ruei and 20-year-old Kuo Chen Yu.
They were driven to create it in 2022 by their own curiosity to study the intensity of earthquakes on the island.
On top of using data from the Taiwan's authorities, Lin and Kuo's team installed more than 130 seismic sensors across the island.
And because of these sensors, Lin says, there's a chance they can provide an earlier quake alert compared to Taiwan's meteorological body, the Central Weather Administration.
In recent weeks, users of their Disaster Prevention Information Platform jumped from 3,000, to 370,000.
While there's a government-run system already in place that sends text alerts and a loud noise to residents' phones when the shaking starts, it can be patchy.
It drew criticism for not sounding in Taipei on April 3 when a 7.2-magnitude quake hit the island's remote east coast.
The alert only goes out to phone users in areas with serious shakes - an intensity of 4 or above, which authorities say are more likely to bring damage, or disrupt power or water supplies.
Wu Chien-fu, Director of the Central Weather Administration's Seismological Center, told Reuters he's aware of calls to lower thresholds for official alerts, but the authorities are moving ahead cautiously.
"We will review the need to send a quake alert to everyone when a major quake hits. For example, when one of magnitude 6.5 hits, should we issue an alert even though its intensity level is at three since there is a need for disaster prevention? I think we should discuss the matter of 'advance deployment', as it is quite rare to receive a national level alert, so it will increase public awareness. I think it's better to conduct a review instead of just trying to satisfy public opinion..."
However, he encouraged research and development of alternative tools for disaster response, some which offer extra functionalities such as turning on the torch of a phone before the shaking starts, or alerts for smaller quakes which do not trigger government warnings.
For student Lin Ruei, he says what he really wants to do is to "predict earthquakes", maybe even 10 days ahead of one.
While that technology doesn't exist today, he hopes it does in the future, and that it buys people precious time and saves lives.
