Device orientation lock causes problems

Question

I got an app that is locked in landscape orientation. Now, when I change the devices settings to set its orientation locked to portrait, some problems occur.

After a bit of testing, it seems that for each Activity that is started, the onCreate is called twice. First time for portrait orientation, second time as an orientationChange with orientation set to landscape. The first orientation is wrong, and probably has something to do with the device being locked to portrait. In the app, the orientation is forced to landscape programmatically (using setRequestedOrientation), and I prefer to keep it that way, if possible, for various reasons.

Any ideas about how to avoid this behavior?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Ok, I found a solution myself. After a lot of searching and digging in the code, the solution was fairly simple.

All I had to do was add:

android:configChanges="orientation|screenSize"

... to all my Activities in the manifest file.

This tells the app that I will handle configuration changes myself in the code. Instead of doing this, I didn't add any handlers for these config changes. This way, my Activities aren't recreated when the orientation change happens at the creation of those Activities. I can do it this way, because my app is locked in a certain orientation.

This post came closest to my problem, but it's solution didn't work for me: Android: set activity orientation BEFORE onCreate, but not in manifest (HDMI plugged in issue)

This post gave me the answer: http://www.acnenomor.com/1053172p1/oncreate-were-called-twice-after-implementing-setrequestedorientation

Answer 2

Try setting up the orientation directly in the manifest instead of programmatically. Under your activity tag in AndroidManifest.xml add android:screenOrientation="landscape".

This should force the activity to be directly created in the correct orientation.