Rotation has been among the unsung heroes of my personal Android setup for ages now, but somewhere along the way — probably whilst switching from one phone to another, at some point — I kinda lost track of it and stopped actively setting it up. I recently realized that, corrected my misstep, and rapidly remembered what an absolute gem this innocuous little power-tool is and how much it improves my endless on-screen interactions.
In its most basic form — which is absolutely how I’d suggest using it — the way Rotation works is enchantingly simple:
- You just tell the app how you want your phone to handle rotation most of the time, by default.
- For me, this is in a forced portrait orientation, without any automatic rotation whatsoever — ’cause few things irk me more than my phone’s screen flipping itself around when I don’t want it to (like when the device is sitting in my car at an angle or I’m leaning back on a couch, mayhaps, and it ends up getting into all sorts of wonky screen-rotation states as a result).
- Then, you create a handful of specific exceptions for when you want that default position to change.
- I limit these mostly to app-specific scenarios — so, for instance, Rotation knows that I might use Chrome, YouTube, or my Pixel phone’s Camera app in a horizontal position and so goes ahead and rotates the screen when those apps are open and being used and it seems like I’m holding the device in an appropriate position. But it also knows I virtually never want my screen to rotate when I’m looking at, say, Messages or my email or the Phone app, so it doesn’t rotate when those apps are actively in focus.
- That’s the most useful element of Rotation for me, personally, but you can also explore other conditions — like telling the app to keep your phone in a specific locked-screen rotation position when you’re in the midst of a call, when your device is locked, or when it’s charging, docked, or connected to an audio device over Bluetooth.
The most important point here, however you want to set things up, is that you’ll only have to do this once — and Rotation will then just quietly work on your behalf, running in the background and making things work the way you want without ever requiring any active thought or effort again.
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