During August 2023, we managed to reach a significant Thunderbird for Android milestone: the beta release of our new account setup interface!

Great forward progress on the New Account Setup, some Material 3 experiments, and more in this month’s Thunderbird for Android progress report.

Apparently our July has been so busy that we didn’t find the time to write up the progress report for June. But a late report is better than no report! Let’s check in on the development of Thunderbird for Android.

Our journey to transform K-9 Mail to Thunderbird for Android involves more than just improving the user interface and adding new features. K-9 Mail is already an important part of the open source ecosystem on Android, and because it lays the foundation for the future of Thunderbird on Android, we believe it’s important to invest in the security health of the software. 

Thunderbird for Android gets one step closer, as K-9 Mail integrates Thunderbird’s Autoconfiguration feature for new accounts.

We asked Jon Hicks, the creator of the original Firefox and Thunderbird logos, to re-imagine his iconic design in light of Thunderbird’s exciting future. 

We’re back with another progress report as we continue improving K-9 Mail for its transformation to Thunderbird for Android! We spent most of the previous month preparing for a new stable release. In April 2023, we finally published K-9 Mail 6.600.

Having recently joined us as a full-time Android developer, Wolf brings his passion for building mobile applications to the Thunderbird team. He’ll be helping to bring new features and an updated interface to K-9 Mail as we transform it into Thunderbird for Android. I spoke with him about his first computer, what he hopes to accomplish for the Thunderbird mobile app, and how our community of contributors can help!

Last month we reported on the progress we made in turning K-9 Mail into Thunderbird for Android. Since then a month has passed, so it’s time for another detailed update. Let’s dive in!

While K-9 Mail / Thunderbird for Android is developed in the open, following its development on GitHub can be somewhat tedious for a casual observer. So we’re trying something new and summarizing the most notable things that happened in the past month.