For anyone who suffers from carsickness, the pattern is uncomfortably familiar. You’re in the passenger seat, you glance down to answer a message or read anything on your phone, and within minutes, your stomach is begging you to stop.
Google thinks a few moving dots would help.
Android 17 has started to roll out a feature called Motion Assist, which puts animated shapes around the edges of a phone’s display. The indicators react to a vehicle’s acceleration, braking, and turning, providing the eyes with visual information that can better match what the body is feeling, The Verge reports.
That makes a weird-looking software feature much more useful for commuters, parents on road trips, rideshare passengers, and anyone else who regularly reaches for a phone from the passenger seat.
For Alphabet (GOOGL), Motion Assist is a key part of the smartphone war against Apple. Sometimes the feature that consumers remember is not another AI benchmark or a faster processor. It is the one that tackles an irritating problem they actually face.
Google’s weird dots tackle a very normal problem
Motion sickness is typically associated with conflicting sensory information. While the eyes are fixed on a relatively still phone screen, the inner ear of a passenger can feel the acceleration, turns, and braking of a moving vehicle.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Yellow Book, the most widely accepted explanation for motion sickness is sensory conflict or mismatch.
Motion Assist seeks to mitigate that mismatch without requiring passengers to put their phones away.
For example, when a vehicle turns right, the indicators travel across the screen in the opposite direction. The indicators move with the vehicle when it brakes, mimicking that movement.
Importantly, the indicators appear around the edges of the display rather than over the content someone is trying to read.
In theory, this means a passenger can keep reading a message, looking at directions or scrolling through a webpage, while peripheral cues help the brain make sense of the vehicle’s motion.
For the person in the back of an Uber trying to respond to a work email or the teenager staring at a phone on a long family drive, the upside is easy to understand.
Android users can customize how Motion Assist works
Google is also giving users some say in how noticeable those moving indicators become.
Users will be able to adjust the opacity of the indicators and choose different colors and shapes via Motion Assist, according to The Verge. They can configure the feature to turn on automatically when Android senses they’re in a moving vehicle, or they can flip the switch in Quick Settings.
The rollout appears to be gradual. The Verge said the feature was not yet present on two Pixel devices it tested, citing Android Authority’s finding that some Pixel phones were beginning to get it.
Android’s strangest upgrade may be one of its most useful.The India Today Group / Getty Images
What Android users need to know
Feature: Motion Assist
Software: Android 17
Purpose: Designed to reduce motion sickness while looking at a phone in a moving vehicle.
How it works: Uses the phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope to create visual cues that correspond with vehicle movement.
Customization: Users can adjust indicator opacity, shapes, and colors.
Automatic mode: Motion Assist can activate when the phone detects a moving vehicle.
Availability: The rollout is occurring in phases, with some Pixel phones receiving it first.
Apple equivalent: Vehicle Motion Cues.
Those controls could matter, since the visual cues themselves must solve one problem without creating another. A feature designed to make staring at a phone more comfortable won’t be very effective if the moving images themselves become annoying.
Automatic activation may be especially significant. The function can pop up when the phone senses passengers are in a vehicle, so they don’t have to remember to dig through settings every time a trip starts.
This makes Motion Assist less of an accessibility type of setting people might forget exists and more something that could become part of daily Android use.
Apple got there first, but Google is closing the gap
This isn’t the first time Google, a big smartphone firm, has tackled this problem.
Apple has introduced Vehicle Motion Cues to the iPhone and iPad with iOS 18 and iPadOS 18. Apple’s approach also uses moving dots on the corners of the screen to show changes in vehicle movement without obscuring the primary content.
Apple now enables car Motion Cues to automatically activate when an iPhone recognizes that the user is riding in a car.
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The Verge’s Thomas Ricker posted an anecdotal example of why the technology can matter. Ricker, who has to work from the passenger seat when on the road, said Apple’s anti-nausea feature allows him to operate his devices when he’d otherwise have trouble stomaching it.
That’s not clinical proof that the device will work for everyone, but it does show the consumer proposition remarkably effectively.
For someone who usually gets nauseous staring at their phone while in a moving car, even a slight improvement can make the gadget far more usable on a commute or road trip.
Why Google’s Motion Assist matters on Main Street
Here’s where a seemingly small Android upgrade gets a lot more fascinating.
Americans spend a lot of time traveling between home, work, school, and other places. Phones are now coming along on just about every leg of those excursions.
Motion Assist aims to give motion-sick passengers some of that time back.
A commuter on a bus might be able to catch up on email. A passenger on a long car ride might be able to read just as fast without getting carsick. It can make it easier for parents to keep the kids entertained while driving.
And someone in the back of a cab might finally get to finish what they were doing before they got into the car.
Behavioral remedies for motion sickness include getting a visual horizon reference and avoiding visual tasks that aggravate the sensory conflict, the CDC noted.
What’s fascinating about Google’s solution is that it tries to resolve the underlying visual conflict while still enabling the passenger to keep staring at the screen.
There’s a significant caveat: This is a passenger function, not a reason for drivers to use their phones. Apple clearly tells users not to use its similar feature when they need to pay attention for safety, and the same common-sense restriction applies here.
Why a few moving dots matter for Alphabet
No investor should anticipate Motion Assist to meaningfully move Alphabet’s quarterly performance.
But that doesn’t make the feature irrelevant to the larger Google tale.
The smartphone race is increasingly about hundreds of little variations in the everyday experience. Camera upgrades, battery management, accessibility features, AI tools, and conveniences such as Motion Assist all add up to whether consumers believe their existing ecosystem is doing well by them.
Apple had stolen Google’s thunder, releasing Vehicle Motion Cues first.
Now Google is abolishing that distinction.
That’s important, since Android is so much more than an operating system. It’s a major entry point into Google’s broader ecosystem, including as Search, Maps, YouTube, Gemini, and the Play Store.
A consumer is never going to pick a phone because its processor scores a certain benchmark.
But the “I can look at this phone in the car and not feel as sick” benefit is one that doesn’t really need an explanation.
That’s what’s interesting about Motion Assist.
Google’s latest Android trick looks like a bunch of odd dots running across a screen.
But for some passengers, those dots may mean the difference between putting the phone aside and really being able to use it.
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