Can Corona fix Android orientation change bug? Fails to obey system preferences

Solar2D Android
#41

You’re right, it has nothing to do with Android 6. But it’s going to get looked at when we get back to adding  Android 6 support. Android 6 changes how permissions are done which means we will be working with build.settings (speculation).

Sure adding some flag in build.settings might be the User interface to it, but behind the scenes we have to make it work. As I said, Corona SDK managed rotations programmatically and apps, Corona or not, don’t usually use that setting (if I translated the Engineers correctly). At a minimum, we are going to have to figure out how to read that setting. Figure out how to make it work on all the versions of Android we support. So I’m not promising anything. Perhaps its easy, perhaps its very hard.

Rob

#42

Rob: Thanks for your reply. I think this may actually be a one-line change on the part of Corona.

Corona is probably using the Android “fullSensor” orientation, which allows for the four normal screen orientations. If you change that to “user” it will act the same as fullSensor except when the system-wide orientation preference is set. Documentation is here: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/activity-element.html#screen

I may be wrong, of course, but it would really be a shame if this bug sat in a queue for an indefinite time – when it may merely require your colleague to type about 10 keystrokes to fix… :frowning:

Meanwhile, I am going to have to release a build disabling all orientation change and landscape support on all Android devices because our users hate, hate, hate this Corona SDK bug and are savaging our Play Store ratings as a result. :frowning:

#43

I can only go on what engineering told me. This does not feel like low hanging fruit.

#44

Rob: Because of this Corona SDK bug, we’ve been forced to release a new version of our app on Android that disables all rotation, even for tablets (Android tablets are now locked into portrait mode, not the more useful landscape mode). You can see the release notes here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.recent.personal.news

It’s been a few weeks–it sure would be nice for Corona to fix this so we can support the same minimum functionality on Android as other apps on that platform. :frowning:

#45

And now one of our users just wrote to us: “I loved your recent news app until the last update. I can not change to landscape and I will not use it in portrait. Is this a bug or did you lock portrait on purpose?”

This Corona SDK bug is damaging our app store rating, is unnecessarily annoying our users, and is impossible for us to fix. Corona staff need to fix this. We cannot. It makes both our app and Corona SDK look bad.

It’s been 2.5 weeks – do you have an update on when this Corona SDK bug will be fixed? 

#46

Hi @corona273,

We have a potential fix for this which should be tested in the next couple days. I’ll keep you posted…

Brent

#47

Brent: Yay! I will email our users back and tell them a fix may be coming soon. (If I sound frustrated, it’s because I’m channeling what our users have been telling us…)

Thanks again.

#48

Brent: 'evening! It’s been another week and this bug has not been fixed in the latest daily builds (as far as I can tell), so I thought I’d check in. Do you have an updated estimate on when this SDK bug will be fixed?

Thanks!

#49

Hi @corona273,

The engineers are continuing work on this (I’m monitoring their progress, ha ha). This issue has turned out to be anything but low-hanging fruit, unfortunately… there should be a resolution soon though.

Brent

#50

Thanks, Brent, for the update. Please let us know when you have more to share!
 

#51

After lots of headache, this issue is finally resolved.

As Brent said, this turned out to be far from low-hanging fruit. One reason for this is that we needed custom code to handle the auto-rotate setting correctly on API Levels 10-17 for portrait or landscape only apps.

Another reason is that different vendors also have their own ways of handling orientation behaviors, so sifting through these different behaviors and all the edge cases took a significant amount of time to get right.

Anyway, the fix should come in build 2745.

#52

Thank you! We are planning to submit to the play store a new build today that fixes the auto-rotation bug.

#53

We have submitted the build. It seems to be working fine in our on-device testing. Thanks again.