Re: Android orientation
Posted: Wed May 08, 2013 8:24 pm
Thanks for the explanation. Android gets very messy on this and many other points...
Screen rotation is not entirely determined by device orientation. The Nexus 7 for example has a toggle on the notification bar so you can choose the rotation while the device is lying flat. There are apps and custom ROMs that add the same functionality to almost any device. These devices almost certainly outnumber the 2.x tablets. If someone were to update the screen rotation support so it followed native/built-in apps, would it be (hypothetically) OK to drop the legacy tablet support?
FWIW, the installed base of mobile devices that install new apps is almost entirely under 3 years old and a massive majority are under 2 years old. Android has a move fast and break things approach and Apple actively pushes developers away from supporting old hardware and software (e.g. removing support for older SDKs from XCode, occasionally requiring all new apps submitted to be built against the latest SDK, no checking for use of classes/methods that aren't available in the target OS version etc). My view is that if you don't adopt a slightly more aggressive policy on dropping support for old firmware than you have for desktop OSs then the code will become increasingly hard to maintain over time for very little commercial benefit.
Worth considering at least.
Screen rotation is not entirely determined by device orientation. The Nexus 7 for example has a toggle on the notification bar so you can choose the rotation while the device is lying flat. There are apps and custom ROMs that add the same functionality to almost any device. These devices almost certainly outnumber the 2.x tablets. If someone were to update the screen rotation support so it followed native/built-in apps, would it be (hypothetically) OK to drop the legacy tablet support?
FWIW, the installed base of mobile devices that install new apps is almost entirely under 3 years old and a massive majority are under 2 years old. Android has a move fast and break things approach and Apple actively pushes developers away from supporting old hardware and software (e.g. removing support for older SDKs from XCode, occasionally requiring all new apps submitted to be built against the latest SDK, no checking for use of classes/methods that aren't available in the target OS version etc). My view is that if you don't adopt a slightly more aggressive policy on dropping support for old firmware than you have for desktop OSs then the code will become increasingly hard to maintain over time for very little commercial benefit.
Worth considering at least.