how to change navigation icons location on Android tablet?

littlerock

On my current android tablet, the navigation icons always move with the direction of the screen to appear at the bottom as I look at it. I find this very useful when watching videos holding it in landscape direction.

I recently bought a new tablet (Huawei) and find the navigation icons are fixed to always appear on the right hand side of the screen even when I hold it in landscape orientation. How can I make them change dynamically to appear at the bottom of my screen to correspond to the direction I am holding it?

charlotte1994

So you want the screen to rotate to landscape? Do you know which Model of tablet it is and which OS it is running?

Most Androids these days will have a pull down menu at the top, if you swipe your finger from the top of the screen downwards, the menu should also come down. There should be an icon there which has a rectangle with 2 arrows around it, if you click this it should enable the screen rotation!

agrinnall

My reading of the OP is that the screen is rotating but that the 3 icons (triangle, circle, square) don't move with it but remain in their original position. It's what happens on my phone (Nexus 5X, Android 8.1). I can't see any way to change it (although I agree it is a bit annoying).

littlerock

yes you are correct and I want it to always appear at bottom of screen including when it is held in landscape mode. I am used to the bar always being at the bottom of the screen. At present when I hold my new Huawei in landscape, the screen moves to landscape but navigation bar remains fixed on the right hand side . It must be programmable because it moves! on my older tablet.!

neilmcl

littlerock wrote: »

yes you are correct and I want it to always appear at bottom of screen including when it is held in landscape mode. I am used to the bar always being at the bottom of the screen. At present when I hold my new Huawei in landscape, the screen moves to landscape but navigation bar remains fixed on the right hand side . It must be programmable because it moves! on my older tablet.!

Not necessarily. Every manufacturer has their own version of the Android OS installed on their products, some with features that your describe, some not, some are closer to the stock, vanilla version of Android, most are not.

littlerock

My current tablet is 4 years old and was only a cheap one. Seems both surprising and disappointing that my Huawei, bought last month and praised as one of the best in its class, should be less user friendly.

Why remove a user friendly feature? I must say it never occurred it would not rotate the entire screen, so I never bothered to check if it also rotated the navigation bar, I thought all tablets did.

Anyone else like to check what theirs does? ( I am talking 11" tablets here, not phones.) Is there an app I can get that will do the business?

neilmcl

littlerock wrote: »

My current tablet is 4 years old and was only a cheap one. Seems both surprising and disappointing that my Huawei, bought last month and praised as one of the best in its class, should be less user friendly.

Why remove a user friendly feature? I must say it never occurred it would not rotate the entire screen, so I never bothered to check if it also rotated the navigation bar, I thought all tablets did.

Anyone else like to check what theirs does? ( I am talking 11" tablets here, not phones.) Is there an app I can get that will do the business?

Well my, pretty much vanilla android 8, Moto G6 phone doesn't move the nav bar down when in landscape mode, it just re-orientates the icons, so I'm guessing it's the default Android behaviour. The behaviour should be the same regardless of whether it's a phone or tablet.

agrinnall

It is the default behaviour because I have stock Android. Any device that does something different must have had that added to it's customised version of Android.

littlerock

I have been doing a little research and found a developers forum where this issue is dscussed.

Historically the display launcher for a tablet worked like my old tablet and auto rotated the nav bar with the screen. Some phones did this too and users complained that when a phone display autorotated, the nav bar jumped from side to side dependong on which way it was held.

To overcome this problem, on Androids the nav bar for phones was set to stay on the right at all times - this was around Android 7.1. Then some manufacturers started to use this fixed nav bar phone launcher for tablets as well, not the earlier tablet version which rotated the nav bar along with the screen. So then the tablet nav bar no longer rotated with the screen in landscape.

A whole raft of developer complaints and queues hen starts up last autumn re this issue on Huawei tablets. Huawei is one of the tablets discussed who use the phone launcher with fixed nav bar on at least some of their tablets. Apparently a fix is promised. It does seem that it was not always the case that phone and tablets used the same launcher.