For anyone who has used an Android tablet or foldable phone as a primary device, the experience has often been quietly maddening. You open an app, and instead of filling the screen, it locks itself into a narrow portrait column, completely ignoring the extra real estate available. This was never a hardware limitation. Developers simply had the option to restrict how their apps behaved, and the operating system went along with it.
Starting with the first beta, already live on Pixel devices, Google is overriding five manifest attributes that previously let developers block orientation changes and prevent resizing. On any device wider than 600dp, which covers tablets, foldables, and large-screen hardware generally, those restrictions will no longer hold. Apps targeting API level 37 will be expected to adapt to landscape, split-screen, and flexible window configurations without exception.
Google has framed this as a requirement rather than a suggestion, which is a notable shift in tone. The company is essentially telling developers that the platform has moved on, and their apps need to move with it.
Users are not losing any control in this process. The system will still let people manually adjust how individual apps behave through aspect ratio settings. The difference is that this becomes a user decision rather than a default imposed by the developer.
The broader context here is hard to ignore. Google is widely expected to launch Aluminum OS, an Android-based platform intended to replace ChromeOS on laptops. A laptop environment demands that apps resize, rotate, and behave like proper windowed software. If Android apps kept refusing to cooperate, that entire platform would struggle to be taken seriously. This change to Android 17 looks very much like preparation for that moment.
