I'm developing a kind of home automation app for iOS. I'm currently running into a spacing problem that I want to have a nice solution to.
The app is always showing a navigation bar and a tab bar, which is quite space consuming. This is a big problem on the current page I'm implementing, which is the Graphs page. In portrait, the spacing is decent, but in landscape mode, I feel like the graphs should be bigger and take up more space than in portrait mode, which is simply not possible with the tab bar and navigation bar.
So my initial thoughts here are if it's "allowed" to hide either the tab bar or navigation bar when in landscape mode (and keep them in portrait mode). What will Apple's reviewers think of this and what will the users think? Will they be confused? Do you guys have any other possible solutions to this?
I'm developing on a iPhone 4C which is quite small. I'm sure it wouldn't be a problem on the iPhone 6, but these small screens needs to be supported.
Thanks for some input on this.
It's absolutely no problem to hide bars in one mode and show them in another, there are a lot of apps that do it, especially when showing graphs.
Alternatively you could hide the bars after a few seconds, and show them again when the user taps the screen or scrolls around (see Safari mobile for an example).