What do you use your Android smartphone for? Well, I don’t know about you, but I use mine for gaming, watching videos, reading, chatting and browsing endlessly through the news feed/timeline of social networking sites. Phones have become so advanced that they perform multiple roles for us. They act as a camera, entertainment device, gaming device and what not.
If you are a smartphone user, the auto rotate feature needs no introduction. It rotates the contents on the screen as soon as you rotate the phone. This feature is useful, but, sometimes it does get annoying. It does annoy me when the entire screen rotates when I’m in the midst of a multi-player gaming session or when I’m watching a video on YouTube.
You might say what’s so annoying in that. Simply disable the auto rotate feature. Well, how many times would you keep enabling/disabling this feature according to your need? Wouldn’t it be nice to disable auto rotate in certain apps on Android? We show you how to disable auto rotate in certain apps instead of disabling it for your entire smartphone.
How to disable auto rotate in certain apps on Android
Step 1: Download the ‘Tasker‘ app first from Google Play Store. After that, go to Settings> Accessibility > Tasker and enable the Tasker app. This is required in order for Tasker to function properly.
Step 2: Now, open the Tasker app and tap on the ‘+‘ button provided at the bottom in the ‘Profiles‘ tab. After that, select ‘Application‘.
Now select the apps for which you want to disable auto rotate. I chose Messenger, Play Music, Quora, Relay and Yahoo Mail to name a few.
Step 3: Now press the back button of your device once after you have selected the apps. You will be taken to the main menu of Tasker where you will be asked to add ‘New Task‘. We gave the name ‘Disable Auto Rotate‘ to this new task, you can give any.
After that, you will be taken to the ‘Task Edit’ menu of the new task that you added. Tap on the ‘+‘ at the bottom of the screen and then select ‘Display‘ from Action category and ‘Display AutoRotate‘ from Display Action category.
You will then be taken to the ‘Action Edit’ menu of Display AutoRotate. Make sure the value of ‘Set‘ category is ‘Off‘ and then press the back button of your device twice. You will be taken to the main menu of Tasker.
Step 4: Now long press on the ‘Disable Auto Rotate‘ task. This will show an option to ‘Add Exit Task‘. Tap on it and give a name to the Exit Task. We gave the name ‘Enable Auto Rotate‘. You can give the one you like.
Step 5: After you have added an ‘Exit Task’, you will be taken to the ‘Task Edit’ menu of that task. Click on the ‘+‘ button located at the bottom of the menu and then select ‘Display‘ from Action category and ‘Display AutoRotate‘ from Display Action category.
You will be taken to the ‘Action Edit’ menu of ‘Display AutoRotate’ action. This time, make sure the ‘Set‘ category has the value ‘On‘.
Step 6: After you have set the ‘Set’ category to ‘On’, press the back button of your device twice. This will take you to the main menu of Tasker.
Here, ‘Disable Auto Rotate‘ and ‘Enable Rotate‘ are the Entry and Exit Tasks of the Profile respectively.
Now whenever you open the apps that you selected in one of the steps above, the contents in those apps won’t rotate even when the auto rotate for the entire phone is enabled.
We have more tutorials with such tricks in our How-To Guides section. Do take a look.
