• Mobile

Mobile Progress Report: September-October 2025

A Brief Self-Introduction

Hello community, it’s a pleasure to be here and help take part in a product I’ve used for many years, but now with the focus on Mobile.  I am Jon Bott, and am the new Engineering Manager for the Thunderbird Mobile teams.  I am passionate about native mobile development and am excited to be helping both mobile apps moving forward.  

Refining our Roadmaps

For now, as we develop, we are refining the roadmap and making more concrete plans for iOS Thunderbird’s Alpha release in a couple of months, and finalizing our initial pass with Account Drawer on the Android (planned for release in the next beta).  We also have Notification and Message List improvements under development.

Carpaccio

As a mobile product, we’ve gone through several changes over the last year or so, from large annual releases, to our more recent monthly beta and release process.  Our next steps are to start sizing our features so they fit better into that monthly cadence, and you’ll see the benefits of this over the next few months as we simplify our planning & process – breaking our large features into smaller, more frequently delivered pieces.  This is based on the Carpaccio method for breaking down features into thin slices with the goal of delivering usable features to our users more quickly, and focusing more on the iterative process helping us take feedback sooner from the community on a feature experience and designs.  Not everything will fit in this, of course, but more will go out sooner as we carve away with our larger goals for the platforms.

Stay Tuned

Over the next few weeks we’ll update our timelines and roadmaps, to what pieces we have high confidence in delivering over the next few months, and a 50,000 foot (15,000 meter) view of our larger pieces we hope to tackle in the next year.  Ultimately our goal is to more quickly reduce pain points you might have, and keep adding polish to Thunderbird’s mobile experience. 

Progress with Thunderbird iOS

We are excited to show the progress we are making in getting the iOS up and running.  Some things are connected, others have sample data for now, but it helps us move quickly and start to share what the UI will be like moving forward.  Here are the actual screen we’ve coded up:

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Jon Bott

Manager, Mobile Apps