• Development
• Mobile

Thunderbird for Android / K-9 Mail: June 2024 Progress Report

Is it July already? That means it’s time for another report on the progress of creating Thunderbird for Android.

Unfortunately, June has been one of these months without any flashy new features that would make for a nice screenshot to show off in a blog post. To not leave you hanging without any visuals, please enjoy this picture of Thunderbird team member Chris Aquino’s roommate Mister Betsy:

For a recap of the previous month’s activity, see May’s picture-less progress report.

New team member

This year Thunderbird has hired a lot of new people. I’m very happy to report that this also included a manager who will coordinate all of our mobile efforts. Some of you may already know him. Philipp Kewisch has been working on the calendar integrated into Thunderbird for desktop and has been with the project in one capacity or another for a very long time. We’re very excited to have him (back).

Building two apps

In June we continued to work on making the necessary changes to be able to build two apps – K-9 Mail and Thunderbird for Android.

Volunteers working on translating the app have probably already noticed that we changed a lot of user-visible texts that included the app name. In cases where the app name wasn’t strictly necessary, we removed it. In other cases we added a placeholder, so the name of the app can be inserted dynamically.

We also worked on internal changes to make it easier to build multiple apps. However, there’s still quite a bit of work left. So don’t expect a fully working Thunderbird-branded version of the app to be available next week.

Material 3

We’re still in the middle of migrating the user interface to Material 3. So far there hasn’t been any fine-tuning. What you currently see in beta versions of K-9 Mail is likely to change in the future. So we’re not looking for feedback on the design just yet.

Targeting Android 14

In May the changes to target Android 14 were included in a beta release. After a few weeks of testing and not receiving any reports of problems, we included these changes in K-9 Mail 6.804, a maintenance release of the stable branch.

As a reminder, these changes are necessary so the app is not run in a compatibility mode on Android 14. It means the app supports the latest Android restrictions (e.g. when it comes to running in the background) and security features. Google Play enforces this by not allowing apps to publish updates without targeting Android 14 after the August 31 deadline.

More translations

Thanks to the work of volunteer translators we were able to add support for the following languages to beta releases:

• Corsican
• Korean (was previously removed because coverage dropped below 70%)
• Vietnamese

Releases

In June 2024 we published the following stable release:

• K-9 Mail v6.804 (2024-06-07)

… and the following beta versions:

• K-9 Mail v6.902 (2024-06-21)
• K-9 Mail v6.903 (2024-06-24)
• K-9 Mail v6.904 (2024-06-27)