Minutes to Midnight: Video and iOS Rotation Lock 

Tim Schmitz:

One result of iOS 8’s size classes is that lots more apps support landscape orientation, and I have a confession to make: It drives me bonkers. I almost never want to use my phone in landscape. It used to be that most apps only supported portrait orientation, so it was no problem if you tilted the phone a little too far. It might send a rotation message to the app you were using, but the app would just ignore it. That means I could read Twitter while lying on the couch without worrying that the screen would suddenly rotate if I tilted a couple of degrees too far. In iOS 8, I find myself more and more tempted to use the rotation lock feature.

In fact, I leave auto-rotation enabled for one simple reason: video. Most video fits far better in landscape orientation than in portrait. The iPhone’s screen is perfectly shaped for wide-aspect video in landscape. Unfortunately for me, iOS won’t rotate video into landscape orientation unless it can rotate the whole OS into landscape. Put another way, if I use rotation lock to keep the phone in portrait orientation, that applies to video as well. That means video gets letterboxed into a postage stamp-sized area in the center of my screen.

I use my iPhone with rotation lock turned on 95% of the time. I hate landscape mode. As a user, I think it’s awful—the available screen size for text entry is tiny and too wide and the keyboard is a different size which breaks my 10-year muscle-memory—and as an iOS designer I never want to build support in for it because I think the metrics of landscape on iPhone lowers the quality and usability of nearly every app (I’m sure there are exceptions, but I’d bet they’re exceedingly rare). People typing with an iPhone in landscape mode generally fail my possible-friendship litmus test.

There are, however, two cases in which I want the option to use landscape mode: playing games and watching video. Tim’s suggestion of video ignoring rotation lock would be perfect (applied to games as well, obviously). If I had my way, I’d remove landscape from iPhone in iOS entirely but for these two scenarios.