Google released the Air Raid Alerts feature for Android phones in Ukraine. This system will alert Android users in Ukraine ahead of air strikes from Russia.
"Tragically, millions of people in Ukraine are now relying on airstrike warnings to try to save themselves," Google President of Global Affairs Kent Walker said in a blog post, as quoted by TechCrunch, Friday (11/3/2022).
"At the request of, and with assistance, from the Ukrainian government, we started rolling out the Air Raid Alert system for Android phones in Ukraine."
Walker said this feature would complement the Ukrainian government's airstrike warning system and based on alerts already sent by the Ukrainian government.
In a tweet, Google's vice president of engineering David Burke said the system leverages a mechanism that Google uses to send earthquake alerts. The system will be rolled out to all Android phones in Ukraine in the next few days.
In the same blog post, Google also announced that it would continue to limit recommendations for some Russian government-backed media on its platform.
The search engine giant has also restricted a number of its commercial activities in Russia, including temporarily stopping advertising sales and removing Russian media apps from the Google Play Store in Europe.
"Following our announcement last week that we were temporarily suspending Google advertising in Russia, we are now ceasing most of our commercial activity in Russia -- including advertising on our properties and network globally for all Russia-based advertisers, new Cloud registrations, payment features." in most of our services, and monetization features for YouTube viewers in Russia," explained Google.
Google said some of its free services, such as Search, Gmail and YouTube, would still operate in Russia. They will continue to monitor developments in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.