It's new that it exists in the US. The US solution, called ShakeAlert, is a ground-up clean sheet design for some reason. I'm not sure why the US Geological Survey didn't seem to coordinate with Japan at all when developing this... maybe there are differences in the seismic characteristics or something, or maybe it's just a classic example of "not invented here".

What's really cool is that Google seems to be augmenting this with data from actual android phones, using them as mini seismometers. If they can get that accurate enough to completely supplant the fixed seismometer systems in the US and Japan, that means that the entire world could potentially get earthquake alerts just by people having phones.