So I am trying to start a project w/o Storyboards and I can\'t seem to figure out why the UIWindow is not passing autorotation commands to the root view controller. With st
Are you using storyboards? If so, you may have old code in your application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions method.
Try removing the following line of code and any others to do with UIWindow:
self.window = [[UIWindow alloc] initWithFrame:[[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]];
Just need to remove above line from AppDelegate.m file.