Earthquake Report APK

Every day many earthquakes occur in the world. But you get to know about them in news only those
earthquakes which have value 5 to 7 or higher than that but what about the other earthquakes which are
occurring in every hour. The case study I have chosen for this project is about earthquakes occurring in
the world. In this application, you can see earthquakes of 1 to 7+ magnitude from all over the world. For
that reason, I have explored the play store to get the design ideas and find the limitations in the existing
applications. I have developed the application by implementing the usability heuristic steps of Jakob
Nielsen (Nielson, 2006).

According to Moon Technolabs, currently, the most popular mobile operating systems are Android and
iOS. But Android has more market share and users as compared to iOS. In this article, they claim
“Android dominates the market with a whopping 87%, while iOS comes at a distant second at 12%”
(Moon Technolabs, 2017). Figure 1 depicts geography distribution of Android and iOS. The reason is
not just Android OS belongs to Google. It is entirely Linux based and partly open source and many
companies like Google Pixel, LG, Samsung, Sony Xperia, and HTC etc. are customizing it and earning
a huge amount.

Earthquake Network is a top-rated application in the play store with 4.5 average stars and with 29,775+
responses. This application developer claimed that “Earthquake Network is the most comprehensive
application on earthquakes and only works with time alerts” (Francesco Finazzi News & Magazines,
2014). This application includes automatic emails and SMS sending facility as compared to other
mentioned applications. This application includes chatroom facility for exchanging information during
an earthquake emergency. It also includes earthquake visualization with augmented reality.

Earthquake Alert is a very famous application with average 4.3 stars and with 23314+ responses (Clemm,
2017). This application shows the latest earthquakes on a map, news related to earthquakes and statistics
of earthquakes. This application is getting the data from USGS website https://www.usgs.gov/. It has a
couple of features such as time, magnitude and location filters, sharing and related news.

Latest Quakes is also simple design optimized for the latest version for android application.
It also has 4.2 average rated with 2500+ responses (Software, 2017). It also shows the
earthquakes data from all over the world, but it also includes push alerts for the user.

There are many other applications related to earthquakes which are much interactive but
providing limited features. It can be seen in the above-mentioned application which has got
beautiful interfaces, but less information and functionality provided to the user to interact
with an application such as Latest Quakes. One of the application is providing valuable data
but not completely following the material design patterns. The application interfaces styles
are outdated and mostly are not following the material designed guidelines and patterns such
as Earthquake Network. This is the best example to evaluate with Neilson heuristic steps.
This application is providing many functional features, but its color scheme is not catchy and
its design layout is also over layered.