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Thunderbird for Android/ K-9 Mail: July and August 2024 Progress Report

40 responses

We’re back for an update on Thunderbird for Android/K-9 Mail, combining progress reports for July and August. Did you miss our June update? Check it out! The focus over these two months has been on quality over quantity—behind each improvement is significant groundwork that reduces our technical debt and makes future feature work easier to tackle.

Material 3 Update

As we head  towards the release of Thunderbird for Android, we want you to feel like you are using Thunderbird, and not just any email client. As part of that, we’ve made significant strides toward compatibility with Material 3 to better control coloring and give you a native feel. What do you think so far?

The final missing piece is the navigation drawer, which we believe will land in September. We’ve heard your feedback that the unread emails have been a bit hard to see, especially in dark mode, and have made a few other color tweaks to accompany it.

Feature Modules

If you’ve considered contributing as a developer to Thunderbird for Android, you may have  noticed many intertwined code modules that are hard to tackle without intricate knowledge of the application. To lower the barrier of entry, we’re continuing the move to a feature module system and have been refactoring code to use them. This shift improves maintainability and opens the door for unique features specific to Thunderbird for Android.

Ready to Play

Having a separate Thunderbird for Android app requires some setup in various app-stores, as well as changes to how apps are signed. While this isn’t the fun feature work you’d be excited to hear about, it is foundational to getting Thunderbird for Android out of the door. We’re almost ready to play, just a few legal checkboxes we need to tick.

Documentation

 K-9 Mail user documentation has become outdated, still referencing older versions like K-9 Mail 6.4. Given our current resources, we’ve paused updates to the guide, but if you’re passionate about improving documentation, we’d love your help to bring it back online! If you are interested in maintaining our user documentation, please reach out on the K-9 Forums.

Community Contributions

We’ve had a bunch of great contributions come in! Do you want to see your name here next time? Learn how to contribute.

Tags: Android Android Progress Report

40 responses

zakius wrote on

Material feels usable at best, I know it’s what people are used to but we should strive for the win95 level of UX, back when designers actually cared about ease of use and accessibility, nowadays they focus on designing “beautiful” screenshots that don’t translate well into actual interfaces
Material being poor isn’t your fault and I believe you can use it as an inspiration to make Google users feel at home while not ruining UX but I’m certainly concerned, and in the visual aspects I feed most modern interfaces have way too big paddings/margins, whatever you call them, the use of space is inefficient, hopefully you can add more compact designs too

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Thank you for your feedback. Our design team genuinely cares about ease of use and accessibility, and they talk about their work in several community office hours – a good one to start with is this one on the work that goes into designing the Message Context Menu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WxS6Pm8Y-g&list=PLMY3ZzVsXXyo1HmIHmNA1KH8fTGAr3IY2&index=2&pp=iAQB. We’d love to invite you to try the betas and offer your feedback – we’ll be announcing how to do that soon.

Muhammad Fachry wrote on

One and important my question is whether K9 users will now have to install the Thunderbird application later or will the current K9 application be migrated?

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Hello! Because of how the play store works, users will need to download Thunderbird for Android, but we will have an easy migration path to move your information and settings from K-9 Mail into Thunderbird for Android. That’s an important question – thank you for asking!

W wrote on

Could you please make sidebar pill less round? It looks awful (like most of the darn Material…) 🙁

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

We’ll let the team know about your feedback!

Flavio wrote on

Congrats, friends! News on the IMAP autodiscover? Eager for that.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Hi! We will definitely include updates on features like that here as they begin to land. Thanks for being patient with us so far!

Jarod wrote on

Great work! An integrated calendar would be nice as well as the overview page.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Thanks for the comment, and we;ll pass your feedback along to the team!

wroot wrote on

Waiting for TB release in app store. Some think K9 icon is cool. I would prefer a more muted blue icon of Thunderbird 🙂

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

That familiar blue bird will be swooping in soon!

Ben wrote on

Finally, another Android update!! The 2 screenshots look really great so far! I’m obsessed with Android and mobile computing and only use Thunderbird (K9 Mail) on what I call my “pocket computer” (Android phone). I tried it on Linux for a few months and I liked the extra features like calendar, contacts, tasks all in one place. Hopefully these will be coming later to Android also? I haven’t been able to find many Android apps that bundle them together. I’m the lead UX designer for mobile apps at my company and I even put together some designs and prototype for fun a couple months back to explore how all the features could work together on Thunderbird mobile. It could be really cool!

Also, K9 Mail and Thunderbird are both listed at https://jmap.io/software.html as “Requested” which seems to mean that’s being explored? Would love to hear anything you can comment on these things. Thanks!

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Hey there! I think I remembered those mockups you made! Those were awesome, and we’re glad you’re so excited about the upcoming Thunderbird for Android. Not much longer to wait now!

Most of our mobile team is in Germany, and I can see what answers we have for calendar and contacts. The first release of TB for Android will be very similar, feature wise, to what we have now for K-9 Mail, but as always, we’re taking feedback and letting everyone know where we’re heading and how our progress is going with these reports!

And I am not sure on the JMAP front, but the best way to follow any changes in status on our end are on this bugzilla report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322991 – as you can see, we’ve been talking about this for a long time! You can also upvote this idea on Mozilla connect: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/jmap-support-or-similar-for-thunderbird/idi-p/28974

Philippe F. wrote on

Will we also be able to manage our calendars and contacts like on the PC version or just emails? thanks.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Hi! If you’re using the current app, it’s largely focus on email. As we further develop Thunderbird on Android, this could change, and this blog is the best place to learn about future development. And, as always, https://connect.mozilla.org is the best way to suggest future features you’d like to see.

Mike wrote on

Thunderbird and K-9 Mail should use the blue color as their accent color in order to match Thunderbird design.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Thunderbird will use the blue color going forward!

Tim Boorman wrote on

When can we expect the next beta version of the app to be released please?

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Soon! Seriously, it won’t be long at all now.

Brian wrote on

Any way to currently test ONLY the Thunderbird application? I’ve been using K9 but I want to start from scratch with a new Pixel 9 Pro.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Watch this space for news about the upcoming release of Thunderbird for Android, so you can try it with all of the Thunderbird branding and the features in the initial release. It won’t be much longer!

Steven Thosmsen-Jones wrote on

Looking good! Can’t wait for this to go gold!

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Thank you, and not much longer now at all!

EnricoFr wrote on

It’s been months waiting for ThunderBird for Android: When we’ll celebrate?

Also: TB for Android in “desktop mode” will it run/display same of TB on a PC?
Because I’m waiting to replace my old Desktop (with everything on it) with a MotorolaG100 in Desktop mode and I hope to see the same old TB…

Ciao !
EnricoFr

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Very soon! Keep watching the blog!

And TB for Android has a different code base, so any desktop view of it would be different from the TB for Desktop app. But that sounds like an interesting suggestion for https://connect/mozilla.org – my husband loves using his phone as a mini-desktop, for example, and this sounds like something he would appreciate too.

Brian wrote on

Will there be an F Droid release of the Thunderbird stand alone application? Very much hoping to not use the Play Store. (Although I do like to test the Beta(s) and the only way to do that is through Play?) I would expect you to eventually phase out K9?

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Yes, Thunderbird for Android will also be landing on F-Droid as well. And yes, K-9 will eventually be phased out. (Also, have you tried downloading releases from GitHub? https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/releases)

Emmanuel wrote on

Hello,

That’s great news. One question, how do you plan to migrate between K9 and Thunderbird for Android. Will we have to re-create our accounts and put our passwords back?
It would also be great to have the calendar (like the desktop version).

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

We will have an easy migration mechanism between K-9 and Thunderbird for Android that you can help us test when the beta release is out! And that is feedback we’ll get to our team re: the calendar – and you can also suggest it at https://connect.mozilla.org!

David wrote on

Being a Thunderbird user since the days it split from Netscape Communicator, I can’t wait for this app.
Did I read somewhere about good sync between desktop and mobile apps?

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Oh wow! Thanks for using us for so long! And yes, we are still working on Sync! Out last update was in June, and we will hopefully have a new update soon: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/07/thunderbird-monthly-development-digest-june-2024/

Maxi wrote on

Awesome! Can’t wait for it to be released.

My question is: will there be some integrated PGP management or are there plans for it?

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Hi! Thanks for the excitement for Thunderbird for Android! As for your question, right now, OpenPGP is supported when OpenKeychain is installed.

Stefano wrote on

Hi.
Allow me to reiterate a comment from July that i think got unnoticed but, with minimal effort, would make a lot of old K9 users happy.
…….
Hi!
Thanks for your work.
I know we sound broken records, but it would be great to have back the (optional, if you like) account overview screen, one of the old glorious features of K9.,
Once removed that, the ratings of the app dropped.
I would consider, specially because is an easy fix and should not become a matter of principle not to have it for the developers… If users love it….
Thanks.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Hi! We definitely noticed the comment and passed it onto our mobile team. You can also get others to comment on your idea and upvote it by submitting it to our official feedback/suggestion site on Mozilla Connect (https://connect.mozilla.org).

Mat wrote on

This looks so cool! One question – our uni blocked Thunderbird for a long time and now they finally whitelisted it – not K9. So the question is if Thunderbird becomes available on Android, will it use the same oAuth as Thunderbird Desktop, so the uni will not need to whitelist the mobile one too (because they will certainly not do that, unfortunately).

> An administrator of [uni] has set a policy that prevents you from granting K-9 Mail the permissions it is requesting.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Hey there! Unfortunately, the apps will use different oAuths. We hope your administrator will budge and add Thunderbird for Android as well!

Hal wrote on

Can’t wait to replace outlook with TB on my phone!

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

We can’t wait for you to have Thunderbird on your phone too!

Comments are closed.