It seems that Android 12 is finally ready to tackle this problem head-on… literally. Google’s solution to unreliable autorotate is to track your head using the front-facing camera. Per Google’s update notes: The company says the face-tracking feature is opt-in, and notes that it uses Android’s new Private Compute Core, so “images are never stored or sent off the device.” The feature currently only works on the Pixel 4 and Later. Newer Pixel devices aside, the company says it’s also optimized the rotation animation and is using a machine learning gesture detection algorithm. Google claims this should lead to 25% reduced latency when rotating your phone for all devices running Android 12, while devices that support face detection should be even more reliable. While I’m a little concerned that Google needed to implement face-tracking at all to improve a feature iOS has been doing pretty well from the start, I’m grateful for the overall improvement.
Rotation aside, the update also includes native support for scrolling screenshots, for things like sharing an image of an entire long webpage, for example. Many manufacturers had implemented this feature on their own skins, but it was not available on most ‘stock’ Android phones. For more on these updates — as well as a bevy of others aimed at developers, you can read Google’s post here.
