How can I disable landscape mode for some of the views in my Android app?
Add android:screenOrientation="portrait"
to the activity in the AndroidManifest.xml. For example:
<activity android:name=".SomeActivity"
android:label="@string/app_name"
android:screenOrientation="portrait" />
Since this has become a super-popular answer, I feel very guilty as forcing portrait is rarely the right solution to the problems it's frequently applied to.
The major caveats with forced portrait:
retainInstance
fragments.So most apps should just let the phone sensors, software, and physical configuration make their own decision about how the user wants to interact with your app. A few cases you may still want to think about, though, if you're not happy with the default behavior of sensor
orientation in your use case:
nosensor
for the orientation. This forces landscape on most tablets and portrait on most phones, but I still wouldn't recommend this for most "normal" apps (some users just like to type in the landscape softkeyboard on their phones, and many tablet users read in portrait - and you should let them).sensorPortrait
may be better than portrait
for Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and later; this allows for upside-down portrait, which is quite common in tablet usage.