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Thunderbird for Android March 2025 Progress Report

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Thunderbird for Android March 2025 Progress Report. We’re keeping our community updated on everything that’s been happening in the Android team, which is quickly becoming a more general mobile team with some recent hires. In addition to team news, we’re talking about our roadmap board on GitHub.

Team Changes

In March we said goodbye to cketti, the K-9 Mail maintainer who joined the team when Thunderbird first announced plans for an Android app. We’re very grateful for everything he’s created, and for his trust that K-9 Mail and Thunderbird for Android are in good hands. But we also said hello to Todd Heasley, our new iOS engineer, who started March 26. We also have just added Ashley Soucar, an Android/iOS engineer, who joined us on April 7. If all continues to go well, we’ll also be adding another Android engineer in the next couple of weeks.

Our Roadmap Board

Our roadmap board is now available! We’re grateful to the Council for their trust and support in approving it. As the board will reflect any changes in our planning, this is the most up-to-date source for our upcoming development. Each epic will show its objective and what’s in scope – and as importantly, what’s out of scope. The project information on the side will tell you if an epic is in the backlog or work in progress.

If you’d like to know what we’re working on right now, check out our sprint board.

Contribute by Triaging GitHub Issues

One way to contribute to Thunderbird for Android is by triaging open GitHub Issues. In March, we did a major triage with over 150 issues closed as duplicates, marked with ‘works for me,’ or elevating them up to the efforts and features described in the roadmap above. Especially since we’re a small team, triaging issues helps us know where to act on incoming issues. This is a great way to get started as a Thunderbird for Android contributor.


To start triaging bugs, have a look at the ‘unconfirmed’ issues. Try to reproduce the issue  to help verify that the issue exists. Then add a comment with your results and any other information you found that might help narrow down the issue. If you see users generally saying “it doesn’t work”, ask them for more details or to enable logs. This way we know when to remove the unconfirmed label. If you have questions along the way or need someone to confirm a thought you had, feel free to ask in the community support channel.

Account Drawer

Our main engineering focus in March has been the account drawer we shared screenshots on in the January/February update. Given the settings design includes a few non-standard components, we took the opportunity to write a modern settings framework based on Jetpack Compose and make use of it for the new drawer. There will be some opportunities to contribute here in the future, as we’d like to migrate our old settings UI to the new system.

We have a few crashes and rough edges to polish, but are very close to enabling the feature flag in beta. If you aren’t already using it and want to get early access, install our beta today.

I’d also like to call out a pull request by Clément, who contributed support for a folder hierarchy. The amazing thing here—our design folks were working out a proposal because we were interested in this as well, and without knowing, Clément came up with the same idea and came in with a pull request that really hit the spot. Great work!

Community Contributions

In addition to the folder hierarchy mentioned above, here are a few community activities in March:

This is quite a list, great work! When you think about Thunderbird for Android or K-9 Mail, what was the last major annoyance you stumbled upon? If you are an Android developer, now is a good time to fix it. You’ll see your name up here next time as well 🙂

6 responses

Peter Lairo wrote on

The thing I miss the most – by far – is an UNDO button for accidental deletions of e-mails.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Trust me, I feel this. If you don’t already use it, this would be a great suggestion to search for and support with an upvote and comment, and to make if it’s not there already, on https://connect.mozilla.org our official feedback site, which helps shape our roadmap!

Eugene wrote on

We are still waining for month releases available in flatpak (Linux).
Only ESR are available for now: https://flathub.org/apps/org.mozilla.Thunderbird

Please.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

This is something we are hoping to do, and we should have more of a timeline soon. There’s more testing and QA we’d need to do to make sure everything went well – especially since not all add-ons work with the Release channel – and we’d need to coordinate this with the flatpak folks as well.

Philipp wrote on

Thank you all for your great work on Thunderbird for Android!

I’d like to suggest to update the roadmap page (https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/android-roadmap) with the roadmap information contained in this blog post.

Monica Ayhens-Madon wrote on

Thanks for letting us know, and this is something we’re working on. Thanks!

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