Seemed even a bit longer before that on the peninsula coastside. The whole thing felt magical, to even know that much beforehand.

Is it true?

Yes indeed.

Earthquakes move through the ground at the speed of sound. Once earthquake detectors on the ground near the epicenter detect it they send the information out at the speed of light, so even factoring in a little bit of delay for calculations, advance warning on the order of several seconds is possible depending on how far away the recipient is.

I'm guessing you're in SF or Oakland?

That would depend on where they were.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/723/

Also relevant: https://xkcd.com/937/

(In this case it seems like the app worked.)

Depends on where in the Bay Area you were:

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nc73799091...

Santa Clara had 2 seconds of advance warning, and Sunnyvale had 4 seconds. San Francisco got 18 seconds of warning, though was outside the "ground motion" zone.

myshake pinged my apple watch while i was recording a cat. Cat definitely did not detect it before myshake, I don't think he even noticed it until the actual shaking.

My Samsung got the notification from Google too, so probably not a Pixel exclusive thing.

Though I wish it would have overridden silent mode. 10s of advanced warning isn't all that helpful if I only find out about the notification 10 minutes later.

You just reminded me to go into my notification history and turn on "Override Do Not Disturb" for the earthquake early warning notification. I really like the notification history for that; you can go back to a notification you dismissed hours ago and edit its settings.

Was this under the "Crisis Alerts" category for Google? Going to set it for my phone too, even though this kind of thing really should be set to override do not disturb by default.

Apparently my phone supports notification history, but it was also turned off by default... Bad defaults strikes twice in a row.

It's in Google Play Services under "Personal Safety". I wish there was an option for it to make noise despite the vibrate only setting as well.

On my Android 11 phone the only thing under "Personal Safety" is "Silence notifications while driving"

My notification arrived minutes late, interestingly.