The Thunderbird for Android beta is out and we’re asking our community to help us test it. Beta testing helps us find critical bugs and rough edges that we can polish in the next few weeks. The more people who test the beta and ensure everything in the testing checklist works correctly, the better!
Anyone can be a beta tester! Whether you’re an experienced beta tester or you’ve never tested a beta image before, we want to make it easy for you. We are grateful for your time and energy, so we aim to make testing quick, efficient, and hopefully fun!!
The release plan is as follows, and we hope to stick to this timeline unless we encounter any major hurdles:
- September 30 – First beta for Thunderbird for Android
- Third week of October – first release candidate
- Fourth week of October – Thunderbird for Android release
This is great, could always use better Android email clients and Thunderbird is quite good on the desktop at least.
K9 mail is all i have ever wanted in a mobile email client. Supports e2ee plugins too.
Mozilla has bigger issue imo. They should focus on maintaining, fixing and improving their existing core products instead of trying to cover everything.
K9 is a near perfect email client.
All Mozilla did was take an existing privacy respecting app (with zero user tracking) and add their spyware telemetry code to it: 544mozilla.telemetry.glean.
Now they are gas lighting users by advertising this new version as “privacy-focused”.
Mozilla is like a virus at this point.
Mozilla bought K9 mail. If you’re using K9, you’ve been “beta testing” Thunderbird for quite somd time now.
Interesting, then it is even more weird to create a new product.
It’s just a re-brand, really. Blue bird instead of red robo-dog.
Thunderbird is not developed by Mozilla Corporation, but an independent subsidiary named “MZLA”.
The only focus of this company is Thunderbird.
The title says “Mozilla” so either the title is wrong or this app is not developed by MZLA.
MZLA makes Thunderbird. Mozilla Corp makes Firefox. Mozilla Foundation owns both.
Will GPG be baked into the app or still relay on third party like open key chain?
Perhaps less AI in Mozilla?
To my knowledge, the ‘AI’ Mozilla has currently is an offline (and completely private) language translation feature, and enhanced screen reader functionality for blind people.
I don’t think those are bad. They make the web more accessible. If they were branded as machine learning features, I doubt you’d be taking issue with them. Literally the only reason people complain about this is because of two meaningless letters being used in the release notes.
Thunderbird is managed by a separate independent company.
If this is just a rebranding; why does there need to be beta test?
Well, first of all, K9 regularly holds beta tests for their new versions before release already.
Being launched under the Thunderbird brand, though, is expected to hit a much wider audience than just K9 users. And being a first impression, they want to do everything they can to make that impression a solid one.
Because they took an existing, completely spyware free app- K9 and added invasive 544mozilla.telemetry.glean telemetry platform to it.
Now they need you to “test it” so they can track you and grab your data.
The main thing they want testing for is the migration tool from a k-9 app installed and configured already on the device, which would be net new code.
I’ll check it out when it publicly releases, but I doubt it’ll replace FairEmail for me tbh.
I’m not in a rush to move over from K-9, but once they add account sync with desktop to the mobile app I’ll def be migrating. Getting to be a bit of a pain to manage Thunderbird on a few PC’s + phone and i’m very much looking forward to simplifying all of that
Eventually it’ll just be a K9 update with a new name and logo.
