SmartRotate: a video-friendly Rotation Lock for your iPhone

While iOS’ built-in Rotation Lock feature can be an asset at times, there are also instances where it tends to be a real pain in the fanny. Case in point: when you begin watching a video and your handset won’t rotate into landscape mode until you manually turn Rotation Lock off.

iOS developer LaughingQuoll understood the problem with this implementation by Apple and set out to come up with a better solution. The result? – A new jailbreak tweak called SmartRotate has now been released.

After you’ve installed SmartRotate, you can expand the Rotation Lock toggle in Control Center with a 3D Touch gesture to expose a worthwhile set of options. As shown in the screenshot example above, those options include:

  • Enable Rotation Lock in portrait orientation only
  • Disable Rotation Lock only for video playback
  • Turn Rotation Lock off entirely

For most people, the middle option concerning video playback will be the most obvious choice, and frankly, it’s almost laughable that Apple hasn’t already devised an official solution for this.

Once installed, SmartRotate adds a preference pane to the Settings app where you can configure a few options:

Here, you can:

  • Toggle the tweak on or off on demand
  • Choose specific apps to exclude from SmartRotate’s functionality
  • Respring your device to save the changes you make here

LaughingQuoll designed SmartRotate to be compatible with all jailbroken handsets running iOS 10 through 12, and if you’re interested in trying it, then you can download it from Cydia’s Packix repository for just $0.99.

Will you be installing SmartRotate to improve your handset’s Rotation Lock experience? Let us know by dropping a comment below.