Disable landscape orientation for phones but allow for tablets

Question

So the general consensus is this; most people use their phones in portrait and most people use their tablet in landscape. Depending on which activity it is my app's layout goes crazy when you rotate on the phone to landscape and it just wouldn't be worth the time to fix considering users are unlikely to rotate here and have no reason to do so. I'm aware of the ole orientation="portrait" trick in the Manifest in the activity element, however this locks tablet users into portrait which wouldn't be appropriate. I would like to disable portrait on all my activities for tablet users yet simultaneously disable landscape on most all my activites for phone users. I tried to pull a fast one by making a layout-large-land folder and no layout-large folder, but that doesn't prevent the orientation from changing on tablets.

Answer 1

If you just use setRequestedOrientation(ActivityInfo.SCREEN_ORIENTATION_PORTRAIT) from code you will catch interesting effect on Android 26+. If the system autorotation option is enabled and you hold phone in landscape orientation and start new Activity it will appears in landscape orientation and then rotate to portrait in a few seconds. You doesn't catch such effect if set android:screenOrientation="portrait" option in the AndroidManifest. But there are not way to have different rotation option into AndroidManifest for phone and tablet.

There's way to solve that if you wish lock portrait orientation on phone and unlock autorotation on tablet.

Set option android:screenOrientation="locked" in the AndroidManifest for each Activity in you project.

<activity android:name=".SomeActivity"
    android:screenOrientation="locked" />

where "locked" – Locks the orientation to its current rotation, whatever that is. Added in API level 18 from Android docs

Then set in parent BaseActivity such code

@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
    int orientation = getResources().getConfiguration().orientation;
    if (isTablet()) {   
        setRequestedOrientation(ActivityInfo.SCREEN_ORIENTATION_SENSOR);
    } else if(orientation != Configuration.ORIENTATION_PORTRAIT) {   
        setRequestedOrientation(ActivityInfo.SCREEN_ORIENTATION_PORTRAIT);
    }
}

There are a few ways to detect that current device is Tablet. Choose implementation of isTablet() method yourself.

Answer 2

I guess you can use a code like this in onCreate() method:

int screenLayoutSize = getResources().getConfiguration().screenLayout & Configuration.SCREENLAYOUT_SIZE_MASK;
if (screenLayoutSize == Configuration.SCREENLAYOUT_SIZE_SMALL || screenLayoutSize == Configuration.SCREENLAYOUT_SIZE_NORMAL) {
    setRequestedOrientation (ActivityInfo.SCREEN_ORIENTATION_PORTRAIT); 
}

And don't specify any orientation in xml, so by default it switches in both mode.

Answer 3

My suggestion would be to first find the way to know at run-time whether the activity is being executed in a Tablet by invoking a resource as explained in this answer. Then set the orientation as explained in this answer.