There’s a lot to love about Google Messages. However, the messaging app isn’t without its fair share of bugs. Since at least the middle of the year, the app’s gallery/camera overlay in chats disappears when the phone is held or angled momentarily in landscape orientation. The worst part is that this behavior persists even if auto-rotate is turned off.
Fortunately, it looks like Google will address this particular issue in a future release of the app. Looking inside version 20251114 of Google Messages beta, Android Authority found evidence showing that a fix for this auto-rotate glitch is on the way. The publication even managed to activate the fix, while also revealing updated portrait and landscape UIs for the camera/gallery experience.
This isn’t one of those major bugs that will keep you up at night. But if you’ve tried sending an image or video to your contacts while lying down on the couch or bed, you will be painfully aware of how annoying it can be.
Good riddance to the ‘Rotate device’ warning
Updated portrait and landscape camera pages
In its current form, Messages users are greeted with the “Rotate device to access gallery” warning whenever their phone detects a shift from portrait to landscape orientation while scrolling through the gallery. All of this can be too much work when all you want to do is share a viral meme from your gallery before you go to bed.
The ‘Rotate device to access gallery’ warning in Google Messages
In addition to fixing this particular issue, the portrait and landscape views for the Google Messages’ camera/gallery interface have also been updated. But there’s still no way to view media from your gallery when the phone is in landscape orientation. On the other hand, users will be able to view more gallery items in portrait orientation, with up to six images fully visible and offering a peek at three more.
This is pretty much everything we know about this fix and the accompanying redesigned elements right now. Since it was spotted in a beta release and had to be activated manually, we presume the rollout to the stable version of the Messages app shouldn’t be far away.
Reports about this bug date back to June, although it’s unclear precisely when it made it into the Messages app. A similar complaint from mid-June can be found on Reddit, indicating that it appeared on Google Messages around that time.
The timing suggests that an early June update to the app, which merged the camera viewfinder and gallery view in chats, may have been the culprit. However, this cannot be verified at the moment.
