I sat down for the first time in a while to work on a personal project - a simple edge-to-edge 'touch to draw' app. I planned to lock the orientation to landscape only to prevent refreshes on rotation. I don't want to recreate and reposition the canvas with its drawing on it. I want the phone to act like a piece of paper. Turn the paper, and the drawing turns with it.

Well, it turns out devices running Android 16+ readily ignore the android:screenOrientation setting, which means my canvas and Activity will instead go through that classic and very visually distracting rotation animation to refresh everything, whether the Activity is recreated or not. It's not great when my target audience is my toddler. I was hoping to keep the experience super smooth for her with no visual or functional disturbances.

How can I handle that without opting out of adaptive layouts (until 17) or simply marking my art/drawing app as a game? Feels like game dev are cheating lol. Any ideas for locking the drawing canvas and HUD items in place? I'm struggling to come up with something.