Google’s Phone app keeps turning sideways, and users are confused again

Back in September 2025, users began getting annoyed when their phone calls switched to landscape orientation while using the Google Phone app. As it turns out, the Google Phone app had just started supporting landscape UI for calls, and users with auto-rotate enabled on their phones were seeing the intended behavior but mistakenly thought it was a bug. Users are complaining once again that the Phone app is turning to landscape, and, as before, it might still be intended behavior.

Reddit user xylarr pointed out that the Google Phone app on their Pixel would rotate every time they made a call. As the user notes, the global system setting for locking down auto-rotate stops the UI from flipping from portrait orientation to landscape, as it should.

Several users chimed in to say they have noticed this “bug” too — the Google Phone app auto-rotates its UI when system settings are set to honor auto-rotation. This is intended behavior and makes sense, so why the complaints?

If you’re still scratching your head on what’s happening, the Phone app previously only supported a portrait UI, with no option of a landscape UI at all. Many users keep system-wide auto-rotation enabled on their phones, but this setting would do nothing in the Phone app (in the dialer and during calls) because the app did not support a landscape UI.

When Google added a landscape UI, users began complaining that the app’s UI rotated (it should be rotating!).

Google countered this “complaint” by adding a dedicated Portrait UI toggle for calls in the Phone app’s settings — when toggled on, the Phone app would ignore the system’s auto-rotation setting and keep the UI locked to portrait.

However, it seems the landscape UI keeps being added and removed from the app between stable updates, while the toggle to lock to portrait UI has yet to make its way from the beta release to the stable release. This leads to situations where you have landscape UI but no lock, then go back to not having landscape UI (and hence being locked by default), causing a lot of confusion.

For users still facing this “issue,” the easiest fix is to disable your system-wide auto-rotation, which will lock all apps, including the Google Phone app, to portrait mode. The ideal case would be for Google to roll out both the landscape UI and the portrait lock toggle to the app’s stable release as soon as possible and stick to its decision. Until that happens, we expect to hear more complaints from confused users.