Launching into portrait-orientation from an iPhone 6 Plus home screen in landscape orientation results in wrong orientation

Question

The actual title for this question is longer than I can possibly fit:

Launching an app whose root view controller only supports portrait-orientation but which otherwise supports landscape orientations on an iPhone 6 Plus while the home screen is in a landscape orientation results in a limbo state where the app's window is in a landscape orientation but the device is in a portrait orientation.

In short, it looks like this:

When it is supposed to look like this:

Steps to Reproduce:

1. iPhone 6 Plus running iOS 8.0.

2. An app whose plist supports all-but-portrait-upside-down orientations.

3. The root view controller of the app is a UITabBarController.

4. Everything, the tab bar controller and all its descendent child view controllers return UIInterfaceOrientationMaskPortrait from supportedInterfaceOrientations.

5. Start at iOS home screen.

6. Rotate to landscape orientation (requires iPhone 6 Plus).

7. Cold-launch the app.

8. Result: broken interface orientations.

I can't think of any other way to enforce a portrait orientation except to disable landscape altogether, which I can't do: our web browser modal view controllers need landscape.

I even tried subclassing UITabBarController and overriding supportedInterfaceOrientations to return the portrait-only mask, but this (even with all the other steps above) did not fix the issue.

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Here's a link to a sample project showing the bug.

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Answer 1

This appears to be a bug in iOS 8 when using a UITabBarController as a root view controller. A workaround is to use a mostly vanilla UIViewController as the root view controller. This vanilla view controller will serve as the parent view controller of your tab bar controller:

///------------------------
/// Portrait-Only Container
///------------------------

@interface PortraitOnlyContainerViewController : UIViewController

@end

@implementation PortraitOnlyContainerViewController

- (NSUInteger)supportedInterfaceOrientations {
    return UIInterfaceOrientationMaskPortrait;
}

@end

// Elsewhere, in app did finish launching ...

PortraitOnlyContainerViewController *container = nil;

container = [[PortraitOnlyContainerViewController alloc] 
              initWithNibName:nil 
              bundle:nil];

[container addChildViewController:self.tabBarController];
self.tabBarController.view.frame = container.view.bounds;
[container.view addSubview:self.tabBarController.view];
[self.tabBarController didMoveToParentViewController:container];

[self.window setRootViewController:container];