iOS Orientation bug

Every September means pain for iOS developers- you need to make sure your old apps/code run on the new iOS system/Apple devices, as well as update the iOS SDK, deprecate your code, API, etc. And ready to comply with whatever requirements Apple asks for.

This bug I encountered is iOS 6.0 only, on which Game Center has portrait view only. When API is being called, it will crash on landscape only games.

Xcode will error out something about autoRotate which isn't the real cause.

People say apple fixed this bug for later version of iOS 6.

The workaround I came up, is to support Portrait view in UIWindow, but disable it in the rootViewController by setting up the landscape mask.

In order to access a UIApplication, we need to do it from UIApplicationDelegate, the delegate class has a UIWindow, and the UIWindow has a rootViewController (after iOS 4.0), and you can add your UIView as subview to rootViewController.

(This is quite normal for any 2D based display system, you will need to have a display container hierarchy anyway.)

Everything works fine, problem seems to solved...

However, google mobile ad sdk interstitial triggered this rotation malfunction. Some interstitials have both landscape view and portrait view, even though the interstitial starts with the current orientation, if you rotate the screen to portrait view, the interstitial will automatically rotate to portait view. Because portrait view is possible in UIWindow.

Now when you close the ad, the game mistakely got rotated, even tho the rootViewController only has landscape views.

For some reason interstitials are added to UIWindow directly, instead of being added to rootViewController like banners are. Part of the reason might be that Google Mob Ad Sdk interstitial class is not derived from UIViewController, it derives directly from NSObjects. So I've tried to add the InterstialViewController directly to rootViewController and presentViewController, now the interstitial is cut off and only shows up 1/3 of the screen. In another trial, the UI input is disabled. After all, both ways ended up with the interstitial being rotatable, which causes the game play to rotate.

Some people suggest use UINavigationController and set those rotation related functions. It wouldn't work because this app is really really really f**king old, it isn't even using Storyboard at all. Tried to change class declaration for rootViewController or interstialViewController, no luck.

What makes it even harder to debug is, if this is a native or modern iOS app, i could do everything in the project, adding flag checks. But this app is using our internal framework, AppDelegate is a static libarary class, otherwise i could add a game center flag check directly and control the supportedOrientation for window accordingly.

Plus, certain functions, for example the accelerometer and rotation function made by the framwork group seems to be working in parallel with the iOS system level function, but they are out of sync, the core functions cannot detect the portrait orientation, it simply ignores it!

So after digging out more stackoverflow posts, people mentioned using setOrientation, or manually change the rotation. This is an unofficial/non-public interface. We cannot depend everything on iOS itself. So my final solution for this is: in willDissmissInterstitial function, manually rotate the window 90 degree secretly.  This works fine, nobody knows until i tell them.  (btw, if you put it in didDismiss function, you will notice a glitch)