• Development

Mobile Progress Report – July/August 2025

Hello wonderful community, it has been a while since the last Mobile update.

A lot has happened in the past 2 months, so let’s jump right into a quick overview of current work in progress and primary efforts.

Account Drawer in progress

If you’re rocking the Beta version of Thunderbird for Android, you might have noticed that all your unified folders have disappeared! Don’t panic, that’s just temporary.

We’re still churning through the technical debt and the database inconsistencies in order to create through virtual unified folders for all your accounts.

The final goal is the same as the one we shared in a previous update, which you can see the final mock-ups here:

Expect more updates in the coming releases.

iOS account setup

The work on the iOS version is moving at full speed!

We found ourselves in a bit of a tight spot due to the recent announcements of Apple with their new iOS 26 version, and a somewhat complete redesign of all the SwiftUI and general Human Interface Guidelines.

When will iOS 26 be widely available and adopted?

Will we have our iOS version of Thunderbird ready before that?

If we build it on current iOS 18 design guidelines, how would that look on the new version?

Will we need to update everything right after releasing the first version?

Due to these uncertainties, we decided to focus only on the new iOS 26 user interface and be compatible with the new version right off the bat.

We will need to test and explore carefully how that behaves on iOS 18 and prior, hoping for some available translation layers in order to guarantee compatibility.

For now, here’s a sneak peek of the Account Setup flow for iOS!

Read/Unread status improvements in Android

As we move through an old codebase and we work hard to modernize components and layouts, it is unfortunately inevitable that we accidentally break old features or setups that are familiar to users.

We apologize for the inconvenience, especially in this latest highlighted issue which created some discomfort when it comes to the visual distinction between read and unread messages.

The old UI offered an option to customize the background color of those states. Even if this solution sounds like a good approach, it created multiple problems related to following system themes, light/dark mode variations, and the overall outdated implementation that needed to be removed.

Some users were dissatisfied, and rightly so, due to the less than optimal visual distinction between those states that solely relied on background colors.

We already improved the overall visual consistency and distinction in that area, but we’re working towards implementing a much clearer visual representation for each state that doesn’t just rely on background colors.

We’re implementing a combination of background and foreground colors, font weight variation, and a visual indicator that specifically represents unread and new messages.

This approach will remove any confusion and hopefully completely fix this problem.

Thank you all those involved for your feedback and concerns, and for using the Beta version to provide early feedback and test the new updates.

A new release cadence

Starting from September, we’re switching to a faster and more consistent release cadence.

The first week of every month we will release a new beta version, for example v13b1, followed by a new incremental beta version with improvements and fixes directly from the main branch, being released every week during that month (eg: v13b2, v13b3, etc).

At the end of that month, the current beta, after being deemed reliable and having passed our QA steps, will be promoted as a stable version and at the same time a new beta branch will be released.

In summary, starting from September you can expect a new stable version and a new beta cycle every month.

Changing our cadence will allow us to expose new and work in progress features more quickly to our beta audience, and shorten the waiting time for users on the stable branch, with smaller and consistent incremental improvements.

Cheers,

—

Alessandro Castellani(he, him)
Director, Desktop and Mobile Apps | Mozilla Thunderbird