Android 15 could make it easier to use your phone in landscape mode – Android Authority

Although Google designed Android’s UI to fit well on phones and tablets, it optimized the UI to look better in portrait mode for phones and in landscape mode for tablets. This makes more sense since phones are naturally meant to be held in portrait mode and tablets in landscape mode, but there are times when you want to use either device in the opposite orientation. If you rotate your Android phone to landscape mode, you may notice that some system UI elements, such as the lock screen and notification panel, are not optimized, at least on Android d ‘origin. Fortunately, the Android 15 update could bring an optimized landscape layout to both the lock screen and the notifications panel on the phones.

Before introducing the new lock screen and notification panel layouts, I want to mention how they look in the current version of Android 14. Since the lock screen can’t rotate at all in stock running Android 14 on phones, I have nothing to show there. On the other hand, the notifications panel has a landscape layout already stock on Android 14, but with some problems. For starters, there’s a lot of wasted space since two-thirds of the screen is reserved for notifications which only span about half the width of the panel. The top third is taken up by a row of four quick settings tiles, which is nice, but other things like the quick settings edit button, brightness slider, foreground services task manager , user switcher, settings shortcut, and power menu shortcut are not. watch. These remaining items only appear when you fully expand the notifications panel, requiring another swipe down. Fortunately, Android at least manages to fit the media player in its undeveloped state, but the downside is that there’s less room for notifications.

In contrast, the new notification panel layout that I manually enabled in Android 15 leaves enough space to display your notifications, four of your Quick Settings tiles (in a 2×2 layout), the brightness slider, and the remaining elements mentioned previously. . In fact, the new notifications panel for phones essentially looks like a smaller version of the notifications panel on tablets.

Likewise, the new landscape layout for phone lock screens resembles that of tablets.

I first spotted the landscape-optimized UI for the lock screen in Android 14 QPR1 Beta 1, released last September, while I spotted the landscape-optimized UI for the notifications panel in Android 14 QPR2 Beta 2, released in December. Although these landscape-optimized UIs have been present in Android builds for a few months now, they are still clearly unfinished, as I encountered several bugs while using them. For example, the media player overlaps the lock screen shortcut on the left as well as the At a Glance widget. The quick settings page count counter incorrectly thought there were only three pages when there were six (although this was corrected upon a reboot). Finally, when you go through the Quick Settings tiles, you can see them pop out below the notifications on the right.

Despite these issues, the new landscape-optimized layouts for the lock screen and notifications panel are clear improvements over the current baseline. I hope Google fixes these issues soon so that it can bring the new UI to Android in a future update.