The wait is over! Download and learn how to help us test the Thunderbird for Android beta for the upcoming regular release.
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
Been using K-9 for a time and tried Thunderbird - it feels kind of smoother and there are some visual overhauls but ended uninstalling it because it was hard for me to tell which mails were unread (and which ones not) in the main mail list while in dark mode. I guess I'm not the only one who felt that way and surely they will fix it but this also left me the sensation that there's not much sense in switching to Thunderbird if you're using K-9.
On 13 June 2022, it was announced that K-9 Mail had been taken over by MZLA Technologies Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation with current maintainer Christian Ketterer joining the team, and plans for K-9 Mail to be rebranded as Thunderbird for Android following the completion of a feature roadmap, including sync with Thunderbird on PC, integrating Thunderbird's automated account setup system, message filtering, and improvements to folders.
Bit of a, bit of b. It is not yet. But the final version of Thunderbird will replace K9. So if you're not happy with the beta, write an issue in their bug tracker.
Mozilla has gone full evil already, they took the only full featured, completely privacy respecting email app on the platform and killed it and they did it sneakily as well just like they did with PPA on firefox.
Luckily K9 in its existing version is fully functional. Users who care about privacy can continue to use K9.
They are the same. It is the same app. They have announced that they will keep both K9 and Thunderbird in parallel, but the underlying program is the same - it will be only a cosmetic difference. This has to do with app IDs and user preferences, etc.
Here is the K9 Beta that is the same version as the new Thunderbird (beta) app. You are just switching from the beta back to the release.