> Or when Google decided to remove rotation from the home screen on Android 2.3 -- it wasn't a huge problem, but I could have sworn that something changed. Users were conflicted, many convincing themselves that the homescreen never rotated at all.
For this specific feature, on LineageOS, you can restore home screen rotation. I don't really understand why it's off by default though, it's confusing to have apps rotate but not the home screen.
I've always assumed they know what they are doing (Android UX seems quite good, despite what my three years younger self would think), but I don't get this. Is it because you can mess up your home screen by adding or moving icons when rotated?
> For this specific feature, on LineageOS, you can restore home screen rotation. I don't really understand why it's off by default though, it's confusing to have apps rotate but not the home screen.
I think it is either because iOS doesn't rotate the home screen on phones, or because they introduced this simplified car interface that did rotate, and they wanted to differentiate. But like so many design choices, it was not due to technical reasons, but marketing or political reasons.
It's funny, when I used Windows 10 for the first time recently, Ubuntu's unintuitive lock screen finally made sense, since they copied it. Whenever open source software starts doing something strange with their interface, I only have to look at proprietary software to see what interface they cargo-culted, going back to Pidgin copying iChat. I would love to see the discussions where they make these decisions. I imagine someone bursting into a meeting "You guys, Microsoft did a thing with their interface, we have to put everything else on hold to copy them!"
When I used versions of android with home screen roatation, I remember it would completely jack up most of my widgets. They were designed to be displayed at some aspect ratio and that aspect ratio would change after rotation. Maybe they got rid of the feature because it wasn't worth it to herd developers of widgets into fixing this issue.
For this specific feature, on LineageOS, you can restore home screen rotation. I don't really understand why it's off by default though, it's confusing to have apps rotate but not the home screen.
I've always assumed they know what they are doing (Android UX seems quite good, despite what my three years younger self would think), but I don't get this. Is it because you can mess up your home screen by adding or moving icons when rotated?