iOS 7 motion sickness: Can the iPhone's new operating system make you nauseous?

Do the floating apps on Apple’s iOS 7 leave you feeling dizzy and nauseous? Well, you’re not alone — hundreds of users are complaining about iOS 7 motion sickness caused by their iPhone and iPad’s buoyant new design.

Yes, iOS7 has a new bug, and it could be a vomiting one. The design of the new OS features the apps floating over the wallpaper, easing from side to side as you move the phone. This, says Rhett Allain in Wired, is a "classic example of parallax" — or the illusion of it, so that the app appears to be facing you, no matter what angle you look at it from. "It's sort of annoying and cool at the same time," he says.

To annoying and cool, you can now add potentially nauseating. Many Apple users have found the illusion — and the zooming apps flying toward you when you click in and out of them — turns their stomach, in a similar way to reading while in a car or airplane. Some notable Twitter users have related their stomach-churning experiences using iOS 7:

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The site’s talkboards have also been flooded with complaints. Fast Company posted a complaint from "nybe" saying they had to "go home ‘sick’ from work because of the intense nausea due to using my phone with iOS 7."

Even though "my phone is making me sick" is possibly the worst excuse in history for leaving work early, this does seem to be a widespread problem — and with 60 percent of Apple users having already upgraded to the new system, it’s surely only a matter of time before statisticians are chalking up what this phenomenon is costing the economy in lost productivity.

So how can we prevent this fast-spreading "Apple sickness" from crashing our fragile recovery? The company won’t let you downgrade to iOS 6 and the prospect of using your phone less is even harder for most iPhone addicts to stomach. Luckily, The Huffington Post has discovered a way to mitigate the worst of the effects:

If that hasn’t solved the problem, then don’t worry — app developers are on the case. James Thomson, developer of a calculator app for the iPad, has disabled the animation on his own app to reduce the motion, and tells Stuff magazine it would be easy for Apple to follow suit:

Apple is staying characteristically silent on the epidemic of "Apple Sickness," and, as anyone who has ever dealt with Apple as a customer knows, it’s more than used to stonewalling the most grievous of complaints. So stay strong, sufferers. Stay strong.