Thunderbird for Android finally arrived in October, bringing the classic desktop client to phones and tablets. Now, more updates are on the way to fix bugs and add features.

After the app released, the development team started working on user feedback and making the app more stable. They improved account selection by using letters from account names instead of two-letter domain abbreviations to help users manage similar accounts more easily. The team also plans to add more personalization features, like custom icons. The Thunderbird team also fixed the dynamic reordering of accounts to clarify which account is currently active.

The initial feedback from users has been good, with hundreds of thousands of downloads and a lot of community involvement. Since the release of version 8.0b1, around twenty new people have started contributing to the Thunderbird for Android and K-9 Mail projects (Thunderbird for Android and K-9 use the same codebase). The app used to have a crash rate of 4.5%, which was a big issue. However, after the updates in version 8.1, this crash rate has dropped to about 0.4%. The initial crashes were mainly due to problems that new users faced when first using the app. Users can expect even more improvements with version 8.2.

✕ Remove Ads
Crash Rate for Thunderbird
Thunderbird

Work is currently being done to improve notification features. There are issues for Gmail users using K-9 Mail because of new requirements from Google, and a temporary support article has been created to help with this. This article will be included in the login process in version 8.2. They’re also looking into problems with setting up push notifications and delays in email delivery, and they’ve provided documentation to assist users. In the future, there are plans to integrate notifications directly into the app to make them clearer and easier to act on.

The Mozilla mobile team said the success of Thunderbird for Android depends on community support, which includes user feedback, coding help, and financial contributions. More information about these plans will be shared in 2025.

✕ Remove Ads

Source: Thunderbird