The iBag—It Just Works™
Apple has a motion sickness problem on its hand, and it's a problem the company should fix ASAP. Complaints have been mounting since the release of iOS on September 18th, and there's enough evidence to indicate it's a serious issue for a small number of users.
The problem appears to be the way apps zoom in and out when they are launched or quit. Some folks have found that the effect induces motion sickness and nausea.
In Apple's support forums, a thread with 371 posts begins, “The zoom animations everywhere on the new iOS 7 are literally making me nauseous and giving me a headache. It's exactly how I used to get car sick if I tried to read in the car.”
That comment about reading in the car has been common with these complaints. As noted above, this is something that affects a small percentage of users, but for those users, it's quite serious.
“iOS 7 has made my iPhone unusable,” one user told me personally, and all she wants to solve it is the ability to turn the effect off.
“Yes, APPLE! Please allow disabling of all this ZOOMING!” gillywonk wrote on Apple's forums, another common refrain from affected users. The problem is there are no controls for the effect in iOS 7.
In addition to the forum complaints, the topic has garnered many headlines, a natural product of media hungry for Apple to make a mistake. Frankly, I think this topic qualifies as just that, a mistake.
It's hard to understand how this problem escaped detection during the design and developer beta testing process. In retrospect—and things always look so easy in retrospect—it's hard to understand how the ability to turn app zooming off wasn't part of the accessibility controls included in iOS.
Perhaps developers and designers are less prone to this form of motion sickness? I'd be surprised if that's so, but one way or another the problem is real and it needs to be fixed. Hopefully it will be a component of the next maintenance release for iOS 7, or Apple's next iPhone accessory might have to be that iBag.