World Natural Disasters

About World Natural Disasters

Every disaster alert on your phone is about where YOU are. This one is about where the people you love are.

Add the places that matter — your parents' town, your sister's city, the village you grew up in — and get told when something happens there. Floods, earthquakes, wildfires, storms, volcanic activity, extreme heat.

WHY THIS EXISTS

Phone-based alerts are location-bound by design. They run off the cell tower you are connected to, so they can only warn you about where you are standing. If you work in Dubai and your family is in Gilgit, no phone alert will ever tell you about Gilgit.

That is the gap this app fills.

WHAT YOU GET

• A watchlist of places anywhere in the world, each with its own alert radius
• Plain-language severity — "strong shaking, buildings may be damaged", not just "M6.2"
• Weather, a 5-day forecast and air quality for every place you watch
• The local time at each place, so you know whether it is 3am there before you call
• A world map of active events, sized and coloured by severity
• 12 offline safety guides — what to actually do, no network needed
• Official emergency numbers and agency contacts for 145 countries, built in and offline
• Alert history, so you can see what you missed

RESTRAINT IS THE POINT

Most alert apps drown you. Ours sends at most 6 ordinary alerts a day, only at the severity levels you choose, and it collapses repeat events — sixty aftershocks produce one notification, not sixty. You can set quiet hours; only extreme events break through.

Behind that limit sits a small reserve of up to four more, which only an extreme event can ever use. Six routine warnings in the morning can never quietly swallow a magnitude-7 earthquake that evening.

Being told about things that did not matter is the fastest way to stop trusting an alert app, so restraint is enforced in the code, not left to you to configure.

YOUR PRIVACY

No account. No sign-up. We never ask who you are.

The places you watch are stored on your phone and are never uploaded — not even to a cloud backup. The app does not ask for location permission and cannot see where you are.

The app is free and carries a small banner advert in two places — the bottom of Settings and the end of your alert history. There are none on the alert, map, event, safety-guide or emergency-contact screens, and none are full-screen. Adverts are served by Google AdMob, which reads your device's resettable advertising ID; nothing about the places you watch is sent to it.

WHERE THE DATA COMES FROM

USGS and EMSC for earthquakes, NASA FIRMS for satellite fire detection, NASA EONET, GDACS (UN and European Commission), NOAA/NWS, ReliefWeb (UN OCHA), and Open-Meteo for weather. Every event links back to the agency that published it.

IMPORTANT

This app aggregates public data from official agencies. It is not itself an official warning system and must not be your only source. Always follow instructions from your local authorities. Background checks run about every 15 minutes, which is Android's floor for background work — alerts can arrive a few minutes late rather than instantly.

See what people at an event are reporting, and what is happening within 250 km of you.