• Mobile

Thunderbird for Android January/February 2025 Progress Report

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first Android Progress Report of 2025. We’re ready to hit the ground running improving Thunderbird for Android experience for all of our users. Our January/February update involves a look at improvements to the account drawer and folders on our roadmap, an update on Google and K-9 Mail, and explores our first step towards Thunderbird on iOS.

Account Drawer Improvements

As we noted in our last post on the blog, improving the account drawer experience is one of our top priorities for development in 2025. We heard your feedback and want to make sure we provide an account drawer that lets you navigate between accounts easily and efficiently. Let’s briefly go into the most common feedback:

• The accounts on the same domains or with similar names are difficult to distinguish from the two letters provided.
• It isn’t clear how the account name influences the initials.
• The icons seemed to be jumping around, especially obvious with 3–5 accounts.
• There is a lot of spacing in the new drawer.
• Users would like more customization options, such as an account picture or icon.
• Some users would like to see a broader view that shows the whole account name.
• With just one account, the accounts sidebar isn’t very useful.

Our design folks are working on some mockups on where the journey is taking us. We’re going to share them on the beta topicbox where you can provide more targeted feedback, but for a sneak peek here is a medium-fidelity mockup of what the new drawer and settings could look like:

On the technical side, we’ve integrated an image loader for the upcoming pictures. We now need to gradually adapt the mockups. We will begin with the settings screen changes and then adapt the drawer itself to follow.

Notifications and Error States

Some of you had the feeling your email was not arriving quick enough. While email delivery is reliable, there are a few settings in Thunderbird for Android and K-9 mail that aren’t obvious leading to confusion. When permissions are not granted, functionality is simply turned off instead of telling the user they actually need to grant the alarms permission for us to do a regular sync. Or maybe the sync interval is simply set to the default of 1 hour.

We’re still in the process of mapping out the best experience here, but will have more updates soon. See the notifications support article in case you are experiencing issues. A few things we’re aiming for this year:

• Show an indicator in foreground service notification when push isn’t working for all configured folders
• Show more detailed information when foreground service notification is tapped
• Move most error messages from the system notifications to an area in-app to clearly identify when there is an error
• Make authentication errors, certificate errors, and persistent connectivity issues use the new in-app mechanism
• Make the folder synchronization settings more clear (ever wondered why there is “sync” and “push” and if you should have both enabled or not?)
• Prompt for permissions when they are needed, such as aforementioned alarms permission
• Indicate to the user if permissions are missing for their folder settings.
• Better debug tool in case of notification issues.

Road(map) to the Highway

Our roadmap is currently under review from the Thunderbird council. Once we have their final approval, we’ll update the roadmap documentation. While we’re waiting, we would like to share some of the items we’ve proposed:

• Listening to community feedback on Mozilla Connect and implementing HTML signatures and quick filter actions, similar to the Thunderbird Desktop
• Backend refactoring work on the messages database to improve synchronization
• Improving the message display so that you’ll see fewer prompts to download additional messages
• Adding Android 15 compatibility, which is mainly Edge to Edge support
• Improving the QR code import defaults (relates to notification settings as well)
• Making better product decisions by (re-)introducing a limited amount of opt-in telemetry.

Does that sound exciting to you? Would you like to be a part of this but don’t feel you have the time? Are you good at writing Android apps in Kotlin and have an interest in muti-platform work? Well, do I have a treat for you! We’re hiring an Android Senior Software Engineer to work on Thunderbird for Android!

K-9 Mail Blocked from Gmail

We briefly touched on this in the last update as well: some of our users on K-9 Mail have noticed issues with an “App Blocked” error when trying to log into certain Gmail accounts. Google is asking K-9 Mail to go through a new verification process and has introduced some additional requirements that were not needed before. Users that are already logged in or have logged in recently should not be affected currently.

Meeting these requirements depended on several factors beyond our control, so we weren’t able to resolve this immediately.

If you are experiencing this issue on K-9 Mail, the quickest workaround is to migrate to Thunderbird for Android, or check out one of the other options on the support page. For those interested, more technical details can be found in issue 8598. We’re using keys on this application that have so far not been blocked. Our account import feature will make this transition pretty seamless. 

We’ve been able to make some major progress on this, we have a vendor for the required CASA review and expect the letter of validation to be shared soon. We’re still hitting a wall with Google, as they are giving us inconsistent information on the state of the review, and making some requirements on the privacy policy that sound more like they are intended for web apps. We’ve made an effort to clarify this further and hope that Google will accept our revised policy.

If all goes well we’ll get approval by the end of the month, and then need to make some changes to the key distribution so that Thunderbird and K-9 use the intended keys. 

Our Plans for Thunderbird on iOS

If you watched the Thunderbird Community Office Hours for January, you might have noticed us talking about iOS. You heard right – our plans for the Thunderbird iOS app are getting underway! We’ve been working on some basic architectural decisions and plan to publish a barebones repository on GitHub soon. You can expect a readme and some basic tools, but the real work will begin when we’ve hired a Senior Software Engineer who will lead development of a Thunderbird app for the iPhone and iPad. Interviews for some candidates have started and we wish them all the best!

With this upcoming hire, we plan to have alpha code available on Test Flight by the end of the year. To set expectations up front, functionality will be quite basic. A lof of work goes into writing an email application from scratch. We’re going to be focusing on a basic display of email messages, and then expanding to triage actions. Sending basic emails is also on our list.

FOSDEM

Our team recently attended FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium. For those unfamiliar with FOSDEM, it’s the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting—an event where many open-source enthusiasts come together to connect, share knowledge and ideas, and showcase the projects they’re passionate about.

We received a lot of valuable feedback from the community on Thunderbird for Android. Some key areas of feedback included the need for Exchange support, improvements to the folder drawer, performance enhancements, push notifications (and some confusion around their functionality), and much more.

Our team was highly engaged in listening to this feedback, and we will take all of it into account as we plan our future roadmap. Thunderbird has always been a project developed in tandem with our community and it was exciting for us to be at FOSDEM to connect with our users, contributors and friends.

In other news…

As always, you can join our Android-related mailing lists on TopicBox. And if you want to help us test new features, you can become a beta tester.

This blog post talks a lot about the exciting things we have planned for 2025. We’re also hiring for two positions, and may have a third one later in the year. While our software is free and open source, creating a world class email application isn’t without a cost. If you haven’t already made a contribution in January,  please consider supporting our work with a financial contribution. Thunderbird for Android relies entirely on user funding, so without your support we could likely only get to a fraction of what you see here. Making a contribution is really easy if you have Thunderbird for Android or K-9 Mail installed, just head over to the settings and sign up directly from your device. 

See you next month,