Make iOS’ Rotation Lock less cumbersome with Oriental

The ability to switch between landscape and portrait orientation on the iPhone can be godsend in certain situations, but in certain situations, it can be a real pain in the (redacted) — especially when in bed and your iPhone thinks laying on your side means that you want landscape orientation.

Apple combats this problem with iOS’ optional Rotation Lock feature, but this necessitates an additional step on the user’s part. For that reason, iOS developer Ubik has made a new and free jailbreak tweak called Oriental, which aims to make display rotation smarter for the iOS platform in general.

Once installed, rotating your handset sideways still invokes landscape orientation, but Oriental takes things a step further by displaying the Rotation Lock toggle button as depicted in the screenshot example above. When tapped, this button returns you to portrait orientation, and enables Rotation Lock until the user disables it.

Oriental gets to work as soon as you install the tweak, and given its simplicity by nature, it doesn’t come with any options to configure. A video demo is available in this Tweet from the developer.

If you’re ready to augment your iPhone’s orientation handling, then you can download Oriental completely free of cost from the Packix repository in your preferred package manager. The tweak only supports jailbroken iOS 13 devices at the time of this writing, and its source code is available on the developer’s GitHub page for those interested in learning about what makes the tweak tick.

Will you be installing Oriental? Let us know why or why not in the comments section below.