Question

There are a lot of cool widgets out there that will enable and disable auto rotate on your phone. Disabling it turns it off across all apps on the phone.

Any ideas how they are accomplishing it?

Answer 1

This should do the trick for you:

    import android.provider.Settings;
    public static void setAutoOrientationEnabled(Context context, boolean enabled)
    {
          Settings.System.putInt( context.getContentResolver(), Settings.System.ACCELEROMETER_ROTATION, enabled ? 1 : 0);
    }

Add permission to the AndroidManifest.xml

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WRITE_SETTINGS" />

You can find the documentation here