I stopped accepting a broken tablet experience after Android 17 forced developers to actually try

I own an Android tablet because I want a bigger screen, which, to be fair, is the device's entire purpose. It's easier to read, browse, and do everyday tasks.

For years, plenty of apps I use day to day didn't seem to care that I'd made that choice.

Facebook and Reddit have treated my tablet like an oversized phone, either locking into portrait or leaving huge stretches of the landscape display empty and unused.

Instagram was another repeating offender, stubbornly staying portrait-oriented no matter how I held the device or which way I rotated it.

Android 17 finally enforced that change, and to my surprise, the developers didn't fix their apps on their own. Plenty of large-screen Android devices have run into this same wall for years: a good screen under software that never bothered to use it.

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By  Jon Gilbert

The problem was never my tablet; it was apps ignoring it

Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram treated it like a giant phone

These apps have giant teams of developers behind them and don't operate on a budget. The companies can test their apps on a bigger screen, and I'm sure they must have.

Facebook and Reddit are two of the most used apps on the planet, and both shipped tablet experiences that felt like an afterthought, instead of a one-to-one user interface.

Instagram was arguably worse, since it's owned by the same company that owns Facebook, one of the largest tech companies in the world. It still couldn't fill the screen I was holding.

The device isn't really the problem. It's fine and probably a much better productivity-focused gadget than a smartphone. The apps never had to try harder until now.

Android 17 closed the loophole developers were relying on

The escape hatch is officially gone

Up through Android 15, a developer could set resizeableActivity="false" and screenOrientation="portrait" in their app's manifest, and Android would welcome it everywhere. This also includes tablets, no matter how large the screen size.

Android 16 started to ignore these flags on devices with a bigger display, but it kept a temporary opt-out option for developers who needed more time to adapt their existing codebases.

Android 17 removes that opt-out for any app targeting API level 37. Apps must fill the available window regardless of orientation, whether the developer built it or not.

Games were the only carved-out exception to the rule.

All of this forced app developers to make their apps fill the screen, no black bars or letterboxing on larger screens, which ruined the point of having a tablet.

This isn't instant perfection; it's a forced adaptation

Google admits the transition can look rough before it looks right

Google's developer documentation is upfront about this, saying it doesn't fix everything all at once.

Apps that never accounted for large screens can show stretched layouts, oddly placed buttons, or misaligned camera previews until their developers rebuild the underlying code properly.

It also only applies to apps that target API 37, so plenty of older apps still on previous targets haven't been forced to change and won't behave any differently until official support arrives through developers.

Google set a real deadline for the gap to close, requiring every new app and update on the Play Store to target API 37 by August 2027, which gives developers a clear finish line instead of an open-ended suggestion.

My tablet finally feels like what I paid for

Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram are catching up

I'm not going to pretend that every app on my tablet suddenly feels and looks perfect. There's still a long way to go from here, and it mainly depends on app developers when they see fit to release their respective updates.

Some of the resizing is still awkward, exactly the kind of rough edges Google warned developers about during this transition.

But Facebook and Reddit are filling the screen properly. Instagram has stretched out instead of sitting in a portrait box on a landscape display that clearly had more room to play around with.

Google has been asking developers nicely to fix this for years, and asking nicely wasn't enough to move the needle.

The apps are finally meeting the hardware halfway

It took a rule, not a request

I bought a bigger screen expecting a bigger user interface, and for a long time, that wasn't the deal.

Android 17 has fixed more than one frustration I'd quietly accepted as permanent on a foldable or tablet, and forced resizing is the one that made a difference to my daily use.

Developers won't fix this because they suddenly want to. They'll fix it because Android 17 stopped giving them a way out. This distinction matters, as there is no word on when these apps will officially bring support for a bigger display.