Wireless emergency alerts

The app that receives government emergency, AMBER and public safety alerts broadcast by carriers and shows them on screen. Keep it: Wireless emergency alerts is needed for the phone, its updates or its security.

What it does

Wireless emergency alerts is the receiver app in Google's build of the CellBroadcast Mainline module. When a carrier broadcasts an emergency message to every phone in an area, such as an extreme weather warning, AMBER alert or presidential alert, this app displays it with the alert sound and vibration your country's rules require. Its settings, including which alert types you receive, are in Settings under Wireless emergency alerts.

Also shown as Cell Broadcasts, Emergency alerts.

If you disable it

You stop receiving emergency and public safety alerts. Turn off individual alert types in its settings instead of disabling the package.

How to disable it

On most phones Settings greys out Disable for this package, so ADB is the way to turn it off. The commands below work without root and can be undone.

adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.cellbroadcastreceiver

adb shell pm enable com.google.android.cellbroadcastreceiver

The stronger option removes it for your user only; the original copy stays on the phone and a factory reset brings it back. Prefer disabling: it is easier to undo.

adb shell pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.google.android.cellbroadcastreceiver

adb shell cmd package install-existing com.google.android.cellbroadcastreceiver

New to ADB? Set it up in about ten minutes.

Data and battery

Receives broadcast messages from the cell network and keeps an alert history on the device; it does not send data back.

Where it appears

• Made by Google LLC.
• Android versions: 11 and later as a module.