Thunderbird Mobile is moving forward with large steps on both platforms we support. On iOS, we’re working on the very foundation of a new app—our first built from scratch—and continuing to make progress in bringing the Thunderbird for iOS app to the App Store. For Android, it’s a matter of updating what we have in place to make it easier to use, more reliable, and more efficient. Both platforms are rushing forward to deliver exactly what our users expect from us.

iOS

Starting off with iOS, we’ve focused on a few vital components. This includes the compose screen, account drawer, and OAuth, which allows users to add their accounts using the sign in page of their email provider. For the compose view, our HTML rich text editor is coming along nicely. We forked a WYSIWYG repository, Infomaniak’s “swift-rich-html-editor,” to create a rich text view for both composing and editing. We also added view headers, fixed a bug where we weren’t applying links properly to the DOM, and began porting a proof of concept over to the main app code. This will eventually become the compose view for the final app. We also started the technical design phase for the new account drawer design. 

Android

The Android team has been busy looking into drastic changes to the app to make it more user-friendly, faster, and more reliable. We’re directly targeting feedback we’ve received. We’re also continuing work on developer-friendly features to make contributing to the project easier and faster.

Database Rewrite

We’ve started our large database refactor with a tentative selection of Room. We chose this for a number of reasons, including performance, easier writing of data entities, and the ease of introduction for new engineers. Room is common in Android development, which means we can more quickly onboard new contributors with it. We’ll have an RFC out by the end of August detailing how we’ll implement the new database. 

So why are we rewriting the database? It’s the source of a number of issues with the app. Everything runs through it, from fetching locally-stored drafts, triggering notifications for new messages, syncing, reliability, and even power consumption. By updating the database, we make it possible to drastically improve everything in the app it touches, which is to say, everything.

Feature Flags

Developers will also be happy to know we’re improving the feature flag process. We’ve completed an RFC for a new schema and began work on the technical documentation. We’re looking to develop a local feature flag library that will use OpenFeature and eventually enable remote feature flag management, though that’s not our short term goal. For now, we want to make it easier to create and modify feature flags across build types, without needing to edit so many files to do so. In the future, however, this will make it easier for us to roll out releases, updated features, and even rolling back features that may have issues without having to wait for the app release and approval cycle. It allows us to make a more reliable app with faster feature implementations.

Notifications

Finally, we’ve heard that our users do not like how we handle notifications. We’ve been investigating reported bugs and working to find a path forward that allows us to use previous work to improve notifications.

We’re also looking into a key complaint: setting up notifications and “push” (IMAP Idle) notifications is just too difficult. We don’t make it easy enough for users to set up their notifications and ensure they get email notifications when their email server reports updates. Users have made it clear: that has to change.

We’re currently discussing options with design to consolidate some settings, bring other settings to the forefront, and will be working next month to activate “push” notifications by default for new accounts that support it.

We know notifications are a cause of headaches, even for those who understand how to use the app’s existing features, so we want to address them as quickly as possible. We’ll also focus on identifying issues and helping our users report problems with notifications in detail with user-enabled and anonymous logging that can help us see why a notification did not show for a new email if they want to help us work through it.

Bolt Design Library

Android has also begun the work of moving our Bolt design library out of the app to serve as a standalone library. Currently, we’ve pulled out the foundation layer for mobile that includes fonts, colors, spacing, and other repeated values. Eventually we’ll use WebASM to render the design system and allow contributions directly to the design system, without needing to touch the Android app, potentially allowing it to be platform independent. 

Community

Two crashes were caught in the beta, including a crash related to relative date formats and another to webviews. We want to thank our amazing community of beta testers who helped us catch these before they made it to a full release. Our community contributors have also directly fixed bugs, like issues scrolling horizontally in message views, fixing a button that couldn’t be seen properly in dark mode, fixing an issue with the wrong number of messages in confirmation dialogs, and updates to our historical changelog data to be in a more readable and usable format. We can’t thank our community of testers, contributors, and users enough for the work they put in helping us make Thunderbird a better email client. 

We couldn’t do what we do without you, and, as always, thank you for being part of the Thunderbird community. Here’s to another month making the best email client we can, together!

– Danielle G. (she/her), Senior Android Engineer

The post Mobile Progress Report: July 2026 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

The past month was busy; the theme was evolution. We went into this quarter with our own ideas for what we wanted to accomplish. However, our users had better ideas. With the release of Thunderbird’s own mail service, Thundermail, the need for a better account settings import process across our services and apps became vital.

We have also heard from our users about issues they had with syncing, notifications, bugs, and more. As such, we refined our roadmap, because the goal is always a better, safer, more private email client, and delivering that experience is more important than any foregone projects. Our roadmap can change, but our goal to deliver the best cannot.

Android

On Android, our focus turned to our import function through a QR code. This helps transfer settings from Thunderbird desktop to mobile. We also ensured that it would work for our new Thundermail project. This allows our early Thundermail users to quickly move their accounts to the Thunderbird mobile app. Additionally, we merged fixes for importing accounts, getting the avatar monogram to match the account immediately after setup, and new translations. 

We also began some exploratory work on one of our biggest upcoming projects. Our users have been clear about a recurring issue that they want resolved. Notifications. Notifications on an email client are tricky, especially one like ours, where we support so many different services. Users report not receiving notifications for newly delivered emails, even when polling or push are enabled, notifications appearing improperly in the notification shade, and many others.

We broke this up into two projects. The first priority will be to work on the quick fixes. These are bugs discovered through reports or our own testing. These fixes won’t require an entire refactor of our sync, notification, or database features, allowing us to address user concerns without launching a big project. But we are intending to launch a big project. We’ll do whatever we have to in order to make notifications work as expected. That’s the second planned project, to consider larger performance improvements, even a full refactor of sync, notifications, and the app database if we have to. Prompt email delivery is essential. We’re going to ensure Thunderbird becomes a trusted client for rapid email syncing and notification. 

We’ve also begun investigating potential feature flag options. While we currently have internal feature flags for our debug builds, we’re looking into options that we could host ourselves to ensure privacy, while also allowing us to enable features more quickly, without a full update. This would also allow us to roll back any changes that introduce issues without an app update. We hope it can allow us to launch products more quickly, and potentially even give end users more control over the features they have enabled. 

iOS

The iOS app is coming along nicely, with the core libraries (IMAP, SMTP, and MIME) set up. We’re working on how to store account data in the local database, as well as starting the email compose functionality. iOS will have a WYSIWYG editor for new messages, just as you’ve come to expect from other email clients. Also, this week has been busy with WWDC and understanding how the new tools and operating system will affect and improve our roadmap, mostly in the user interface.

Our Open Source Community

We wouldn’t be who we are without the open source community at our core. Open source isn’t just how we build software, it’s how we plan, make, and grow. Our community has a say in what we do, which includes making changes, bug fixes, suggesting new features, and voicing complaints – this insight from you is our greatest strength. Over the past month, we’ve heard requests for new features, bug fixes, and changes, and we’ve adapted our plans for the rest of the year to focus on this. And hopefully deliver them in more bite-sized pieces.

First, the community has helped drive our upcoming projects. From notifications to investigations into spam filters, our community is helping drive our objectives. Our priorities and our roadmap have shifted thanks to that feedback. With our community having our back, we’re making the best email client available on iOS and Android, and can’t wait to deliver these improvements. We’re listening and working on these highly requested changes. 

A notable contribution from our community came in the form of a fix for our notification widget. The text wasn’t scaling for users with different font size settings. This is a serious accessibility issue. Fortunately, a contributor pushed a fix which ensures the font size scales with the system. We’re grateful for this help, and it’s a perfect example of how we build better together. 

Becoming a Contributor

Interested in contributing yourself? It can be tough to figure out where to start or how to go about it. Soon starting development on the Thunderbird for Android app will be easier than ever. We’re moving our documentation around and adding templates and examples to make everything from requesting new features to working on bug fixes, and even documenting your changes easier. We’ve also added a new pull request template to help you write a detailed message explaining your pull request. This includes letting us know if you’ve used AI in the development and to what level it was used.

One note to say with contributions, given our limited team size and resources, we are focusing our efforts on the top items on the roadmap first and foremost. Second, we will spend a couple of weeks solving the largest impact bugs. Then we will spend a week or two supporting what contributions help resolve bug reports or align with our roadmap. We are intrigued about how AI can help us in these efforts, but we are also vigilant about the quality of the code. Potential contributors need a strong understanding of what they are contributing. This means being able to change, improve, and support the code they contribute in the future.

We have just three engineers on each of our iOS and Android teams. We’re supported by wonderful designers and product folks, but we also couldn’t do it without your support. So, thank you. We’re doing our best to make a great product, and with your help, contributions, donations, bug reports, feature requests, and enthusiasm, we’re able to do it better than ever. Thanks for checking in with us!

– Danielle G. (she/her), Senior Android Engineer

The post Mobile Progress Report: June 2026 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.