Mozilla Thunderbird for Android is now available in beta, built upon the K-9 Mail app.
The beta includes core email features like account setup, email organization, and notifications, with feedback encouraged from users.
Thunderbird for Android will remain a separate app from K-9 Mail, requiring users to migrate if they previously used K-9.
For anyone who was using K-9 wondering why Thunderbird looks no different, it’s because they aren’t different.
They build both apps from the exact same codebase. Only difference between the two are the default color scheme, the branding icons, and the text strings of the application’s name. It’s literally just a choice of which brand skin you prefer.
Which, honestly, kinda cool. A virtually zero-cost way to keep a few K-9 stans happy.
As long as it’s compliant with Thunderbird, eg. using the same autoconfig at /mail/config-v1.1.xml, I’m happy.
Nice to see progress, but so far it seems indistinguishable from K-9.
The feature to import settings from K-9 doesn’t work for me, possibly as a consequence of running CalyxOS.
https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/releases/tag/THUNDERBIRD_8_0b1
Here’s the release page if you wanna grab it from github ;)
Honestly, if you’re in the audience for Thunderbird on Android, you probably want to have a look at FairMail instead.
Why? What does FairMail do better? The headline says it’s privacy oriented, but so is k-9.
I’d say customizability. Haven’t used k-9 since I found FairEmail so can’t really say anything about how it is now but it used to be pretty bare bones. At least compared to FairEmail.
*FairEmail
I’d love FairMail for desktop Linux
They have a desktop for Linux??? I’ve been using it for years and I only get to learn this now! I’m going to try it immediately lmao. Thank you!!
OK, I switched. I don’t know if it’s a placebo because it looks identical but ut feels smoother.
For me it definitely looks different, are you sure you have the new version…? They’ve updated a lot of the UI elements to material design 3, but kept all the same layout and whatnot
I really like it so far! Feels like a really welcome refresh
So excited about this! It looks and feels great.
Anyone make the switch from Aquamail?
I’m interested in Thunderbird but I’ve been very happy with aquamail, so no reason to switch
