It is our opinion that the world is accepting portrait more and more. We aren’t giving up on landscape screens, but it’s important to support portrait as well. Vertical scrolling works on both portrait and landscape, but horizontal is very strange on portrait form factors.
Also worthy of note is that many on our team have been using 1.8 for over 6 months now, and the phone has become the dominant interface. Even before that, the largest screen tablet, the12.9-in iPad pro, was very popular in portrait mode. Another piece of data that’s interesting is that on higher resolution screens running Windows or Mac OS, Roon was often run with a portrait-shaped window or square-shaped window.
We feel that vertical scrolling was the right choice to go with all the other UI decisions in 1.8.