After despising Mozilla for years, she had to give up and swallow thunder bird, although not without restructuring around its organization, which pointed to a more corporate approach. The foundation of Firefox has not been characterized as a fast-paced competition in the last decade, so we recently had proof that an email client will come to Android.
The arrival of Thunderbird on Android was announced rather spontaneously after Jason Evangelho, a well-known Linux popularizer who has recently become Thunderbird’s marketing manager, asked his colleague Ryan Lee Sipes via Twitter if there was anything about the arrival of an email client on mobile phones. which was answered in the affirmative.
With the application confirmed, the question focused on how it would arrive and what technology it would be based on. Our MuyLinux colleagues first speculated that it might be based on Fenix technology, which Firefox for Android has been using for some time, but now we have found that eventually, it adopts the K-9 mail client and converts it to Thunderbird for Android.
The Thunderbird for Android idea based on K-9 Mail seems to have been preparing for years, as Ryan Lee Sipes began talking to Christian Ketterer, K-9 Mail’s chief administrator, about possible collaboration in 2018. The agreement between the parties has clearly gone further than expected since In addition to taking K-9 Mail as a basis, this application was integrated with its main administrator into the Thunderbird structure..
In other words, K-9 Mail will be transferred step by step to Thunderbird for Android, and Christian Ketterer is now part of the team behind the development of the Mozilla-based application. Sipes said the K-9 Mail “Perfectly matches the values of Thunderbird – the use of open standards, respect for the user and allows advanced users unrivaled customization”while Ketterer hopes to bring its experience and expertise in development for mobile platforms.
As we have said, K-9 Mail will be gradually transferred to Thunderbird for Android, so those in charge of the original Mozilla application will provide K-9 Mail resources to improve features and better match desktop versions of Thunderbird in both features and design. Of course, this looks like a long time, as the introduction of synchronization support is planned for 2023.
As such, the K-9 will continue to be available for at least the next few months and possibly part of next year, although users are likely to see an acceleration in its development due to more constant implementation of features and design-level changes.
Overall, K-9 Mail, an email client for Android, is already part of Thunderbird and will gradually become Thunderbird for Android. The transition will materialize as soon as the developers see that it has been sufficiently paired with the desktop versions. One thing that obviously stays on the air is the license, because Thunderbird is published under MPL 2 and K-9 Mail uses Apache 2. The logical thing is to think that the resulting product uses MPL 2 because it is licensed by Mozilla itself. but who knows what’s cooking inside.
