• The incident was referred to as a hack by Iran's state-run IRNA news agency.
• Iranian cyber police accuse Iran Mobile Communications of conducting tests.
• In the year 2020, Google revealed an earthquake detection feature.

On Iranian Android cellphones, phoney earthquake alerts sounded on Wednesday as the nation struggled with widespread protests. Authorities gave conflicting justifications for why the incident took place. Only Android phones received the fake notice, according to Colonel Ramin Pashaei, deputy chief of Iran's cyber police, who made the statement to Iranian state media. He explained the message as the result of testing at Iran Mobile Communications, a state-owned service provider.

Iran's state-run IRNA news agency described the incident as a hack and warned people not to leave their homes because the message was fake. The process of bringing the two conflicting accounts of what occurred together took some time. A request for comment was not immediately answered by Google, the company that makes the Android software. 

Since the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, on September 16 as a result of her detention by the nation's morality police, there have been numerous hacks in Iran. One of Tehran's greatest challenges since the disorganised years following its 1979 Islamic Revolution is the result of months of protests that have now included demands for the overthrow of Iran's theocracy. 

Back in 2020, Google announced the global rollout of its earthquake detection feature for Android phones. Using the smartphones to provide data, Google hoped to eventually give billions of users valuable seconds of warning when a tremor was detected nearby, alerting them to the possibility of an earthquake.

 The earthquake detection function might also make it possible for these alerts to reach more users globally, especially those in earthquake-prone regions of underdeveloped nations that lack access to conventional sensors for earthquake detection.