Android has been on the market for over a decade and, for some reason, a feature that is seemingly as simple as automatic screen rotation it still doesn’t work well in all situations.
Autorotation works especially poorly when you’re lying in bed or on the couch, or using the phone from unusual angles.
Looks like Android 12 finally will solve this problem. Google’s solution to improving auto-rotate reliability is to look at your head using the front-facing camera.
We’ve improved Android’s auto-rotate feature with face detection, using the front camera to more accurately recognize when to rotate the screen.
This is especially useful for people who use their devices while lying on a sofa or in bed, for example.
The company says the facial tracking feature is optional and notes that it uses Android’s new Private Compute Core, so “Images are never stored or sent off the device”. The feature currently only works on Pixel 4 and later.
The company also says it has optimized the rotation animation thanks to the use of a machine learning gesture detection algorithm. According to Google, this should reduce latency by 25% when rotating the phone for all devices running Android 12.