Updated

Updated · Fox News · Sep 3

Google Rolls Out Motion Assist to Pixel Phones on Android 17 as Apple Offered Similar Tool Since 2024

Updated

Updated · Fox News · Sep 3

Google Rolls Out Motion Assist to Pixel Phones on Android 17 as Apple Offered Similar Tool Since 2024

Q: Will continuous sensor tracking for Android's new motion sickness tool silently drain your battery during long trips?

Probably not in any dramatic way, but some extra battery use is likely during long trips. Motion Assist relies on the phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope and keeps an animated overlay running on screen while it is active. Both of those things consume power. In general, however, motion sensors are among the lower-power components in a phone, especially compared with the display, cellular radio, GPS, video playback, or gaming. Android’s own sensor documentation and broader mobile-device engineering practice suggest that the real battery cost usually comes more from the screen staying on and rendering graphics than from the sensors themselves. That means the feature is unlikely to “silently drain” a battery on its own in the way background GPS or heavy navigation apps can. On a long car ride, the bigger battery hit will still usually be whatever you are doing on the phone—reading bright web pages, streaming, messaging, or watching video—while Motion Assist adds a modest overhead. Google has not published official battery-impact figures, so there is no verified percentage estimate yet. Because the feature can auto-activate when the phone detects vehicle motion, users worried about power can avoid leaving it on all the time by using the Quick Settings tile and turning it on only when needed. Lowering screen brightness will likely save more battery than disabling the motion cues alone.

3 articles · Updated · Fox News · Sep 3

Select Pixel phones running Android 17 are starting to receive Google’s new Motion Assist, a feature that adds animated edge dots to help passengers use phones in moving cars with less motion sickness.
The tool uses a phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope to mirror turns and speed changes on screen, aiming to reduce the sensory mismatch between what users see and what their bodies feel.
Google appears to be delivering Motion Assist through Google Play services in a staged rollout, and it has not yet published a full support list or dedicated support page.
Users who get the feature can enable it in Google settings, set it to start automatically in a moving vehicle, and customize the cues’ shape, size, color and opacity.
Apple has offered a similar feature, Vehicle Motion Cues, on iPhone since iOS 18 in 2024, underscoring a broader push to make in-car phone use more tolerable for passengers.