VIDEO: An Android Retrospective
If you can believe it, Thunderbird for Android has been out for just over a year! In this episode of our Community Office Hours, Heather and Monica check back in with the mobile team after our chat with them back in January. Sr. Software Engineer Wolf Montwé and our new Manager of Mobile Apps, Jon Bott look back at what the growing mobile team has been able to accomplish this last year, what we’re still working on, and what’s up ahead.
We’ll be back next month, talking with members of the desktop team all about Exchange support landing in Thunderbird 145!
Thunderbird for Android: One Year Later
The biggest visual change to the app since last year is the new Account Drawer. The mobile team wants to help users easily tell their accounts apart and switch between them. While this is still a work in progress, we’ve started making these changes in Thunderbird 11.0. We know not everyone is excited about UI changes, but we hope most users like these initial changes!
Another major but hidden change involves updating our very old code, which came from K-9 Mail. Much of the K-9 code goes back to 2009! Having to work with old code explains why some fixes or new features, which should be simple, turn out to be complex and time consuming. Changes end up affecting more components than we expect, which cause delivery timelines to change from a week to months.
We are also still working to proactively eliminate tech debt, which will make the code more reliable and secure, plus allow future improvements and feature additions to be done more quickly. Even though the team didn’t eliminate as much tech debt as they planned, they feel the work they’ve done this year will help reduce even more next year.
Over this past year, the team has also realized Thunderbird for Android users have different needs from K-9 Mail users. Thunderbird desktop users want more features from the desktop app, and this is definitely a major goal we have for our future development. The current feature gap won’t always be here!
Recently, the mobile team has started moving to a monthly release cadence, similar to Firefox and the monthly Thunderbird channel. Changing from bi-monthly to monthly reduces the risks of changing huge amounts of code all at once. The team can make more incremental changes, like the account drawer, in a smaller window. Regular, “bite size” changes allow us to have more conversation with the community. The development team also benefits because they can make better timelines and can more accurately predict the amount of work needed to ship future releases.
A Growing Team and Community
Since we released the Android app, the mobile team and contributor community has grown! One of the unexpected benefits of growing the team and community has been improved documentation. Documentation makes things visible for our talented engineers and existing volunteers, and makes it easier for newcomers to join the project!
Our volunteers have made some incredible contributions to the app! Translators have not only bolstered popular languages like German and French, but have enabled previously unsupported languages. In addition to localization, community members have helped develop the app. Shamin-emon has taken on complicated changes, and has been very patient when some of his proposed changes were delayed. Arnt, another community member, debugged and patched an issue with utf-8 strings in IMAP. And Platform34 triaged numerous issues to give developers insights into reported bugs.
Finally, we’re learning how to balance refactoring and improving an Android app, and at the same time building an iOS app from scratch! Both apps are important, but the team has had to think about what’s most important in each app. Android development is focusing on prioritizing top bugs and splitting the work to fix them into bite size pieces. With iOS, the team can develop in small increments from the start. Fortunately, the growing team and engaged community is making this balancing act easier than it would have been a year ago.
Looking Forward
In the next year, what can Android users look forward to? At the top of the priority list is better architecture leading to a better user experience, along with view and Message List improvements, HTML signatures, and JMAP support. For the iOS app, the team is focused on getting basic functionality like place, such as reading and writing mail, attachments, and work on the JMAP and IMAP protocols.
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