Android 17 May Introduce a Smart Feature to Reduce Motion Sickness While Using Phones in Cars

Android 17 May Introduce a Smart Feature to Reduce Motion Sickness While Using Phones in Cars

Using a smartphone in a moving vehicle can be uncomfortable for many people. Symptoms like nausea, dizziness, and headaches often force users to avoid their phones altogether while commuting. This problem, commonly known as motion sickness, happens when the brain receives conflicting signals — your eyes focus on a stable screen while your inner ear senses movement. With people spending more time traveling as passengers, Google appears ready to tackle this long-standing issue in Android 17.

Google is reportedly working on a new accessibility-style feature designed to reduce motion sickness during travel. Internally referred to as Motion Cues, the feature introduces subtle visual indicators that move in sync with a vehicle’s motion. These small on-screen dots shift based on real-time data from the phone’s motion sensors, helping the brain reconcile what the eyes see with what the body feels.

The concept behind Motion Cues is simple but effective. By visually mimicking the motion of the vehicle, the screen no longer feels completely static. This reduces the sensory mismatch responsible for motion sickness and could make reading, browsing, or messaging far more comfortable during car rides, train journeys, or bus commutes.

Although the idea may sound new to Android users, similar solutions have existed for years. A third-party Android app implemented a comparable approach as early as 2018, proving that the concept works. However, Google’s built-in solution aims to deliver a more polished, secure, and system-wide experience.

So why hasn’t Google released this feature yet? While Motion Cues appears functional, current versions rely on Android’s standard overlay system. This approach prevents the visual indicators from appearing over critical system areas such as Settings, notifications, the status bar, and the lock screen. Android restricts overlays in these areas for security reasons, which limits the feature’s effectiveness.

Android 17 could solve this limitation by introducing a dedicated system-level Motion Cues API. Early evidence from recent Android builds suggests that Google is moving rendering responsibilities to SystemUI — the core system component responsible for interface elements like notifications and Quick Settings. This would allow Motion Cues to appear consistently across the entire interface without compromising security.

Under this new framework, Google Play Services would control how the dots look, including their color, size, spacing, and movement direction. SystemUI would then display them using a privileged system layer. This separation ensures smooth performance while preventing misuse by third-party apps.

To maintain control and avoid visual clutter, access to this system-level feature would be tightly restricted. Only trusted system apps with special permissions would be allowed to activate Motion Cues, keeping the experience clean and safe for users.

Because this implementation depends on new system APIs, it requires a full operating system update. That explains why the feature is expected to arrive with Android 17 rather than as a simple app update. There’s still a possibility it could appear late in Android 16’s lifecycle, but an Android 17 debut seems more likely.

When the feature eventually launches, Google may rename it to something like Motion Assist. Regardless of the name, it has the potential to significantly improve comfort for commuters and travelers. If integrated with Android’s upcoming travel-focused modes, it could activate automatically during vehicle movement, offering a smoother and more comfortable mobile experience on the go.