Link: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/google-begins-rolling-out-anti-motion-sickness-feature-on-android-17/

Some people are cursed with motion sickness, which can make it impossible to read or use a phone in a moving vehicle without suffering waves of nausea. There’s a surprisingly simple trick that can make smartphones usable in such situations. Apple deployed it on the iPhone a couple of years ago, and now Google’s own version is finally coming (slowly) to Android.

Motion sickness is caused by a disagreement between what your inner ear senses and what your eyes see. If you’re looking at a book or a screen while in a car, the sensory mismatch can lead to a pretty unpleasant time. As part of iOS 18 in 2024, Apple released a feature called Motion Cues that places a network of moving dots on the screen to alleviate motion sickness, and it seems to work surprisingly well. Google’s version is similar, but it’s called Motion Assist.

Google began testing Motion Assist back in 2024, but it never expanded beyond an internal test until now. Android Authority reports Motion Assist is appearing on Pixel phones running Android 17, but there’s no app or update you can install to get the feature—it’s being delivered by Play Services as part of a staged rollout.

Note that F-Droid already has apps like this one: https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.davidv.motionsickness/

I just installed the widget from F-Droid and it looks convincing. Now to have my wife try it in the car.

edit: it seems to only draw white dots so if the screen is mostly white then the dots are mostly invisible. A configurable colour or just slightly off-white would be useful.

Oh neat! There has been an android app that does this for ages, neat for it to be a baked in option now

I might download the app and use it for a week just to make that kind of suggestion. Seems worth it, for an accessibility feature.

There already seems be an open issue for it. Hopefully the dev will add it soon.

https://github.com/DavidVentura/motion-sickness-app/issues/18

Hopefully it comes to more than just pixels, especially to the likes of Graphene and Lineage