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Comment by milgrim | Hacker News Reader

Cell broadcast is not foreseen to be used in Germany. And my guess is that this „Warntag“ was introduced to prove that the German approach to notify its citizens in these situations (smartphone app, sirens, radio and tv broadcasts) is sufficient and nothing else has to be done to fulfill the upcoming EU-Alert standard that has to be implemented by the member states by 2022. The incompetence of the responsible agencies is ridiculous. Curious to see what the outcome of this will be and if there is any improvement next year.

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> not foreseen to be used in Germany

I don't understand what you mean by that.

Edited - ah, I think you mean they're not planning on using it?

However tangentially - Lithuania never used them and then a few years ago suddenly started using them for pretty much everything (i.e. bad weather at the beach) which is ridiculously annoying as phones have some special type of ringtone for that which makes them almost explode in your face every time they make that announcement.

Yes, that’s what I tried to say. Not a native speaker ;)

Not so easy to implement this the right way I guess. For local emergencies the German app solution seems to work adequately, but for big emergencies the cell broadcast should definitely be an option.

But I see your point, a system like that should be used in a reasonable manner.

Edit: and by „not foreseen to be used“ I mean that Germany can’t, because we don’t have the required technical infrastructure.

> For local emergencies the German app solution seems to work adequately

Are you sure about this? While the NINA App did provide me with weather warnings as well as (possibly pinned) warning about the Coronavirus, I have no information about the delay with which those messages were provided to me. It could well have been a delay of over half an hour or more, without me noticing it.

Yesterday I decided to uninstall the NINA App, since it showed me that it doesn't work. It had all the permissions necessary to pop up a message and to notify my with a sound, yet it didn't do anything.

No, I am not sure about the delay. But the app informed me a few times about things that were happening (fires, bomb disposals) that I would otherwise not have know about.

And it looks like the delay yesterday was actually caused by the bavarians (http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a1a4ef27). But that something like this is even possible in this system is ridiculous of course -.-

This could also be used for local things, by limiting which towers broadcast the message and which don't. No gps, app or data plan required.

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