Should Apps Remove Support for Portrait Upside Down Orientation on iPhone X?

Every iPhone prior to the iPhone X can support portrait upside down orientation. For some apps, supporting this orientation is important for various usability reasons. However, due to the peculiarities of the iPhone X design, portrait upside down orientation appears to be deliberately ignored. Although the device will still report its orientation when in this direction, more importantly, the system UI including the Home control will not change to match this orientation. This is what can be observed from the Xcode 9.0 GM iOS Simulator.


The iOS HIG makes no mention of portrait upside down orientation.


If all of the above is correct (please correct me if I'm wrong), to avoid the mismatch between an app UI that supports portrait upside down orientation, and the iPhone X system UI that does not, is it therefore implied that developers should remove support for portrait upside down orientation for apps on iPhone X?

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eastwest
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I launch settings on my old phone (iOS 9.3.5) and turn the device upside down, the Settings app doesn't care. Likewise, the launchpad icons don't care that I've turned my screen upside down.


So what's changed between that and what you're seeing for the iPhone X? When has the iPhone system interface ever supported being upside down?

Posted by
NotMyName
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Apple never seemed to care for the portrait upside down orientation on iPhone. If I remember correctly, I believe the the old universal application template generated by older versions of Xcode would generate a view controller template that didn't use portait upside down on the iPhone, but allowed it on the iPad (the current version of Xcode may still do this, but it's been awhile since I made an iOS app, more Mac development now).


Even though Apple didn't support portrait upside down in their apps, there was nothing preventing third party developers from doing it. Perhaps it could be needed for some developer of a crazy game or something. I don't know.


With that said, I think an answer to eastwest's question would to be yes. You could do a screen bounds check to prevent portrait upside down on the iPhone X only, though I don't see why you'd bother. I'd just disable it for all iPhones. Unless you have some crazy game or app that makes some creative use of orientation flipping in some weird way, I'd just let it go.


I think we'd all be better off if they didn't introduce another aspect ratio, but that's a diff. convo.

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Macho Man Randy Savage
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