Portrait mode required to log onto an account

TidBITS Talk
1

I am hoping for someone to explain if this matter is a problem at my end or at the other end.

I was unable to use my Mac to log-on to my account via the website of the utility company. Via Safari, the utility’s website informed me that I had to turn the screen from landscape to portrait mode - rather hard with a 32 inch screen.

The company’s customer service people suggested a number of solutions including moving from Safari to Chrome, but the one that worked was to resize the Safari screen to a narrower width.

I’ve never had this sort of issue before. Can anybody suggest why this worked please?

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Were you viewing the mobile version of the website on your desktop computer?

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Hi no not viewing the mobile version of the web site. But I think the company just modified its app and that has started the problem.

4

I don’t understand the mechanism by which modifying an app would affect the website.

If you’d provide the URL of the login website, we could check this out for ourselves and maybe offer some insight.

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It could be that the mobile app is really just a WebView of the website. And the lazy developers a) assumed that the only users would be phone app users, and b) didn’t bother to support landscape orientation layout. So their fix was to tell the users that they’re holding it wrong.

Since changing the window size works around it, it implies that they’re detecting the orientation by just comparing the window’s horizontal and vertical sizes. That give more evidence to the WebView theory; maybe their app isn’t doing native iOS APIs to detect orientation and instead the web page is just using Javascript to check it.

I’ve seen more and more websites that are obviously designed for mobile users first, with enormous amounts of white space, extra large fonts, huge buttons, and lack of conventional widgets & menus. But this takes the cake.

3 Likes
6

Thank you and I have put your analysis to the company.