Everyone has been frustrated with how their phone handles auto-rotation at some point. Sometimes, your iPhone may not recognize that you have rotated it, giving you a less-than-optimal viewing experience.
If you’re turning on your iPhone and it won’t go into landscape mode, there are several possible issues that we’ll be looking into. You may also want to know if it is possible to force your iPhone into landscape mode. So let’s start.
Troubleshooting iPhone Landscape Mode Problems
Remember, although all of the methods below let you change the screen orientation on the iPhone, your phone should theoretically adjust itself whenever you physically rotate it. If it doesn’t, here are some troubleshooting tips to try:
1. Check Portrait Orientation Lock
Are you sure you haven’t enabled Portrait Orientation Lock by mistake? You’ll find this toggle in Control Center, which many iPhone users enable by mistake but find out much later when landscape mode isn’t working.
On an iPhone with a Home button, swipe up from the bottom of the screen to access it. On an iPhone without a Home button, swipe down from the top-right corner of the screen instead.
Here, tap on the Portrait orientation lock toggle (which looks like a lock with a circular arrow) to toggle it on or off. The lock will remain in place until you disable it again.
2. Toggle Display Zoom
As we already mentioned, owners of the iPhone 6 Plus, 6S Plus, 7 Plus or 8 Plus can rotate their home screen. If you have one of these models and it is not rotating, the display zoom feature may be to blame.
Force landscape mode using AssistiveTouch
You can use AssistiveTouch, an iOS feature that comes in handy when your iPhone home button doesn’t work, to rotate your iPhone’s screen to landscape mode, even if you’re using the device in portrait mode. This is the only built-in way to force-rotate your iPhone screen.
You should now see a new floating Home button on the screen. Do whatever action you set on the Open Menu in the above steps, then go to Device > Rotate Screen. You can rotate left, right or reverse.
If you’re worried about the new onscreen icons being distracting, don’t be. It’ll fade out when not in use, and you can tap and drag it to move it around your screen. If you’re new to AssistiveTouch, you may want to learn how to use the virtual iPhone home button.
Unfortunately, if you put iOS into landscape mode and then move your phone, the landscape setting will be overridden. Therefore, you have to use this option every time you reset.
Use a Video Rotation App
One of the main reasons people want to rotate the screen on their iPhone is to watch videos in the correct format. Of course, videos are naturally better in landscape mode, but the nature of smartphones means that many people record their videos in portrait.
It’s easy to rotate a video from the Edit option in the Photos app on your iPhone. But not everyone keeps their videos in this app. Thankfully, some third-party apps on the App Store allow you to rotate your iPhone videos from portrait to landscape and vice versa. One of the best video rotation apps on iOS is Video Rotate + Flip. It’s free to use with ads, which you can remove for a one-time fee of $1.99.
Once you convert your video from portrait to landscape in the app, it will export a copy to your iPhone’s Camera Roll. You can force rotate videos of any length, and the app doesn’t leave a watermark. And finally, because videos rotate at the frame level, the output is compatible with all video players on your Mac or Windows PC.
Is your accelerometer broken?
If you’ve checked all of the above solutions but still can’t rotate your iPhone to landscape mode, it’s possible that your iPhone’s accelerometer is broken. The accelerometer is what tells your device that it has been rotated and then rotates the screen to match.
The best way to check if your accelerometer is broken is to open a rotating app like Notes and wiggle it. If it doesn’t switch to landscape mode as it should, and rotation lock is off, you may have an accelerometer issue.
If you have eliminated every other possible cause then this is a possibility. If you doubt this, you can make an Apple Store appointment at the Genius Bar to have the experts handle it. However, if you don’t have an Apple Store near you, you’ll need to take your device to an Apple Authorized Service Provider.