Apple’s iOS 7 updates are more than just annoying.
To some iPhone and iPad users, they’re actually dangerous to their health.
A small but growing number of users are complaining that the animation used in the new operating system is literally giving them motion sickness. The complaints have shown up on Twitter and in a message thread on Apple’s forums , with users venting about the iOS 7 updates.
The problems are caused by the zooming and parallax animations in the display functions of iOS 7, which some users have compared to car sickness .
“It hurts my eyes and makes me dizzy. So annoying that we can’t downgrade!!!!” one user wrote. Another added that the updates caused “severe vertigo.”
“Lost the rest of the day to it… And not happy at all. It’s the transition between the apps flying in and out.”
Charles Oman, who worked in NASA’s Sensorimotor Adaptation research team studying what causes motion sickness, says what’s happening to Apple device users is a bit different than true motion sickness.
‘It takes a couple minutes of sustained stimulation to activate motion sickness,” he said. “If it were an immersive environment, like a headset or an IMAX screen, then I can believe it, but it’s a little harder to believe on the small screens.”
The strange health reports come on top of more conventional complaints about iOS 7 downloads, which include users unable to connect to the new operating system. There are also reports that battery life reduction will be a permanent problem on iOS 7 — tests on the iPhone 5 showed the battery lasted an average of 444 minutes on iOS 7 compared to 661 minutes on iOS 6.
For Apple users getting sick from the iOS 7 updates, it appears there may be no hope on the horizon. Users who called Apple’s customer support line were told that there was no way to disable the effects other than reverting back to iOS 6.
