A high-school student who designed an app that sends earthquake alerts more readily than the Central Weather Administration (CWA) is facing bandwidth issues after a surge in downloads as wary Taiwanese endure aftershocks from a major quake on April 3.
The app (台灣地震速報), which is free on Apple’s App Store, has been compared favorably with the national emergency alert system, which has remained largely silent to people outside the immediate area of epicenters amid a spate of quakes this month.
The app’s developer, Kang Chiao International School student Lin Tzu-yu (林子祐), said that it had garnered about 10,000 downloads before this month, but they have surged to more than 320,000 since the April 3 quake, which measured 7.2 on the Richter scale.
Photo: screen grab from the App Store
He designed the app using publicly available data online, Lin told reporters on Tuesday at the school’s Xiugang Campus in New Taipei City’s Sindian District (新店).
The app has been praised for its capability to issue warnings seconds before shaking from a distant earthquake reaches the user’s location and for a user-friendly interface that displays information, including a countdown to potential shaking and magnitude predictions.
Lin told Taiwan Television News he has long been fascinated by typhoon and earthquake response measures, and coding, which he taught himself in junior-high school.
Inspiration for the earthquake warning app came when he read about open-source software that analyzes publicly available seismic data, he told the Chinese-language United Daily News.
The app took 18 months to complete, he said, adding that he watched YouTube videos to help him create it, as at the time he knew nothing about coding for Apple devices.
Another difficulty he encountered was a lack of time, as he was studying to get into college while working on the project, he said.
“The surge in users moved me deeply,” he said. “I never thought that 320,000 people would download something I made.”
Asked about comments saying that his app is better than the CWA earthquake alerts, Lin said his program differs from the government’s alert system, as it sends alerts for any earthquake that is expected to be magnitude 4.5 or greater and of at least intensity 3, or “light” shaking.
“Ultimately, the data originate almost entirely from CWA observation stations,” Lin said, adding that he is interested in collaborating with the agency.
However, the interest in his creation has brought problems, as the app is hosted on a server with limited bandwidth that his family pays for, he said.
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