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Those who suffer from motion sickness will know the feeling all too well that can make road trips more than uncomfortable.
Motion sickness, or kinetosis, is caused by conflicting signals being sent by the body, the inner ear and the eyes to the brain.
And starting at stationary things like a phone or a book can knock the passenger quite queasy.
Thankfully, in its recent iOS 18 rollout, Apple introduced a Vehicle Motion Cues feature to help iPhone and iPad users fight motion sickness.
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The new feature adds animated black dots to the edges of your screen that mimic the direction of the vehicle you're in.
The subtle addition helps reduce the sensory conflict, helping your brain sync what your eyes see with what your body feels without disrupting your watching or reading experience.
However, motion sickness isn’t just an issue for Apple users. Is there hope for Android users too?
Well, while there’s been a free Android app addressing car sickness for years, even before Apple's announcement, Google is now developing its own feature to tackle the same issue.
According to strings spotted in the Google Play Services v24.46.30 beta, Google is developing a feature to help users fight motion sickness.
When enabled, the feature Motion Cues will likely use visual prompts to ease sensory conflict and help users avoid that nauseous feeling.
While the details are unconfirmed, tech experts like Android Authority are presuming the feature will perform similarly to Apple's version.
Even better, given that Motion Cues is coming via Google Play Services, it could be available on multiple Android devices. This includes older models so long as they have Google Play Services installed.
Apple users have already been praising the new feature since its launch so it's no doubt the positive feedback will continue with Google's version.
"I’ll have to try this because I do get motion sickness when looking at my iPhone while being a passenger. For me this is amazing, to others… I can see this being not so amazing update. Thanks apple!" wrote one user.
"As someone who takes the bus daily and has bad motion sickness, this thing works and it’s quite amazing. I can now read on the bus!" added another.
"Tried yesterday. Not 100% effective, after almost one hour I noticed some motion sickness, but definitely much better!" a third user chimed in.
As it's still early days, Google has not yet confirmed a release date for the feature or if it ever will come to Android devices in the future.
To activate motion cues on Apple, simply go to Settings > Accessibility > Select Motion > Show Vehicle Motion Cues and choose an option.
