Taking one giant leap for seismological research and proving itself to be a competent early-warning system, the MyShake app detected nearly 400 earthquakes worldwide since its release last February of this year.

This app was designed to capture and record ground motion by using a smartphone's built-in motion detectors - all while running in the background of Android OS phones. It then sends the data back to the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory in California, where it was originally engineered.

According to Berkeley News, around 220,000 people have downloaded the MyShake app to date. The number of phones active and primed to respond - turned on, connected to a WiFi network, and lying on a horizontal surface - at any one time are between 8,000 and 10,000.  

The concept behind the MyShake app was to create an entirely smartphone-based early warning system to produce as accurate a reading as possible on any potential quake in any part of the world. It's essentially a practical, fully-functional program that could save lives and further seismological research. And because it was designed to run as a background process, it won't interfere with regular smartphone use.

It also won't kill your battery, according to Qingkai Kong and Richard Allen - the two scientists who headed the team behind the app. Kong and Allen said they wanted an app that wouldn't use more power than your phone does when it's just hibernating. Ergo, once downloaded and activated, the MyShake app runs as a background system that simply collects data whenever there's data to collect.

And it does its job well. According to Shanghai Daily, the app managed to detect a fairly large quake in Ecuador last April 16. It registered a 7.8 magnitude on the Richter scale and triggered two phones with the app 170 and 200 kilometers from the epicenter.

Kong, Allen, and their team of researchers believe that the sensitivity of smartphone motion detectors and accelerometers, plus the number of smartphone users together in one area, are enough to provide sufficient data for tremor detection. Indeed, for some places, that's all they have to go on.