• Mobile

Mobile Progress Report – April 2026

It’s been a very busy couple of months as we’ve reworked processes & priorities and established a roadmap for both iOS and Android.  We are determining how best we can coordinate with the community, and think that our roadmap for the year has a good balance of fixes and features.  Today, I want to talk about our contributors and pull requests, Notifications in the Android app, progress in the iOS app, and an overview of our roadmap for both apps this year.

Contributors & Pull Requests

We are so grateful for the support and code contributions of many members, whether building items on our roadmap, improving the user experience, or, of course, translating.  As we work on our roadmap priorities, we will make time to review PRs and will discuss them weekly, and prioritize those that help solve issues and bugs or align with our roadmap items. Please be patient with our Pull Request pipeline.  Typically, in working with the community, we try to react very quickly.   

Roadmap

For Android, we’ve chosen the items on our roadmap because we think these will be the highest-impact features and bring the most value to everyone.  Our focus this year is to simplify and modernize the Android codebase.  This means reworking some of the architecture. This will be super helpful for us to move more quickly and will reduce complex bugs. The app has an older codebase, and like many older ones, it has its challenges. We have three full-time Android engineers and several community contributors, and we hope to better position ourselves to move quickly.  At a high level, Android is focusing on the rearchitecture, a better Message List experience, and Message Reader screens.  We are also simplifying how users can connect to Thunder Mail as we open it up.

Notifications

One thing that is at the top of my mind right now, too, is Push Notifications, specifically changes that Google has made to background processes, which affect our Notifications.  We are looking into what we can do to solve this, so know that it has become a top priority for us. I’ve been asked, “Why is it so hard for Thunderbird to get Push Notifications right?” and I wanted to speak to some of the challenges we have.  Most apps’ Notifications are triggered by their own web services, which then send Notifications through Apple or Google, who pass them to users.  But email is different. In an email client, we typically don’t own our own backend services, but other companies do (Microsoft, Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, Proton, etc.).  And they can have their own flavors of SMTP – how we get the emails, and no specific Push Notification implementation. 

So we have a work around: polling those providers ever X minutes asking for new emails, and triggering local notifications – but we can’t hook into a native Push Notification process like your banking app for example. This is under the IMAP implementation. The JMAP implementation (think modern email protocols) has something in place we can more readily consume.  Another challenge is how the battery is affected by how often we poll the providers, and we need specific permissions from Google to run this process in the background.  Those permissions changed recently which is why Notifications are having issues.

I’ve simplified some pieces here, but hopefully that gives you an idea of some of the complexity and tradeoffs that we are working with.  With all of that said, this is very important to us, and is our users’ biggest pain point.  It is becoming our biggest need for a fix.  I’ll give an update on where that sits within the roadmap next progress report when we have explored what solutions we can provide.

iOS Progress

For the iOS roadmap, everything is moving along well.  We have been wrapping up most of our IMAP & SMTP tickets, and we are moving into the Account Data pieces to manage accounts and authorizations.  We will also be having a new member join us in the next couple of weeks.  This will add some speed, but we’ve made good progress in getting the inner pieces together – what I consider the most complex parts.  As we move to more standard mobile backend pieces and more standard UI, we leave the world of unknown unknowns, and will be picking up steam.

At a high level our iOS roadmap is build out these screens:

• Account Setup and Drawer
• Messages: List, Reader, Compose, Search

And have these pieces in place: 

• IMAP
• SMTP
• MIME
• OAuth
• Encryption
• Email Composition 

And our target is still end of the year for the iOS release.  

Thank You!

Again we are so grateful to you, our community, for your support, and we are excited for this next quarter as we start to see the fruits of our labors.