Key Takeaways
- Google could be working on a feature called Motion Cues to help combat motion sickness months after Apple released its version.
- It’s still in its early stages, but Motion Cues could be available through a Google Play Services update, thus ensuring more Android devices can access it.
- Luckily for Android users, there are already a handful of third-party anti-motion sickness apps on the Google Play Store.
Apple recently released Vehicle Motion Cues for iPhones to help people deal with motion sickness during their commute or longer journeys. Although the company received plenty of attention for rolling out this feature, Android smartphone owners have been able to curb their motion sickness using the third-party app KineStop since 2018. But now that Apple has taken this feature mainstream, it looks like Google is finally ready to follow suit with Android.
A couple of strings found inside the Google Play Services beta v24.46.30 by Android Authority have revealed Google’s plans to bring this anti-motion sickness feature to Android, known simply as Motion Cues. Although the feature isn’t live just yet, the strings give us a decent idea about its functionality.
Offering the new Motion Cues feature through Play Services means it will also reach devices that are running older versions of Android. This ensures more users get the feature, which isn’t possible if it’s bundled as part of a platform update. Here are the freshly uncovered strings related to Motion Cues:
<string name=”motion_sickness_enabled_key”>
motion_sickness_enabled
</string> <string name=”motion_sickness_settings_activity_label”>
Motion Cues
</string> <string name=”motion_sickness_settings_page_description”>
Show visual cues to mitigate the motion sickness.
</string>
It may not be dissimilar to Apple’s anti-motion sickness feature
Since the feature isn’t live yet, we can’t say what it will look like on Android. However, based on the strings revealed by the Play Services beta, there will be a Settings option to enable or disable it, similar to Apple’s implementation in iOS 18. The fact that one of the strings says, “show visual cues to mitigate the motion sickness,” is also fairly self-explanatory.
It will be interesting to see if Google will add automatic movement detection when it rolls out Motion Cues to Android devices. Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues offers standard on/off options, along with an automatic setting that makes the onscreen dots appear whenever vehicle motion is detected.
While these newly spotted strings in the Play Services beta do give us a sense of how Google could implement Motion Cues, we may be some distance away from seeing it in action on our Android devices. But given how important a feature like this could be, we hope Google doesn’t take too long. In the meantime, you can check out KineStop from the Play Store, which serves a similar purpose.
