It’s been a very busy couple of months as we’ve reworked processes & priorities and established a roadmap for both iOS and Android.  We are determining how best we can coordinate with the community, and think that our roadmap for the year has a good balance of fixes and features.  Today, I want to talk about our contributors and pull requests, Notifications in the Android app, progress in the iOS app, and an overview of our roadmap for both apps this year.

Contributors & Pull Requests

We are so grateful for the support and code contributions of many members, whether building items on our roadmap, improving the user experience, or, of course, translating.  As we work on our roadmap priorities, we will make time to review PRs and will discuss them weekly, and prioritize those that help solve issues and bugs or align with our roadmap items. Please be patient with our Pull Request pipeline.  Typically, in working with the community, we try to react very quickly.   

Roadmap

For Android, we’ve chosen the items on our roadmap because we think these will be the highest-impact features and bring the most value to everyone.  Our focus this year is to simplify and modernize the Android codebase.  This means reworking some of the architecture. This will be super helpful for us to move more quickly and will reduce complex bugs. The app has an older codebase, and like many older ones, it has its challenges. We have three full-time Android engineers and several community contributors, and we hope to better position ourselves to move quickly.  At a high level, Android is focusing on the rearchitecture, a better Message List experience, and Message Reader screens.  We are also simplifying how users can connect to Thunder Mail as we open it up.

Notifications

One thing that is at the top of my mind right now, too, is Push Notifications, specifically changes that Google has made to background processes, which affect our Notifications.  We are looking into what we can do to solve this, so know that it has become a top priority for us. I’ve been asked, “Why is it so hard for Thunderbird to get Push Notifications right?” and I wanted to speak to some of the challenges we have.  Most apps’ Notifications are triggered by their own web services, which then send Notifications through Apple or Google, who pass them to users.  But email is different. In an email client, we typically don’t own our own backend services, but other companies do (Microsoft, Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, Proton, etc.).  And they can have their own flavors of SMTP – how we get the emails, and no specific Push Notification implementation. 

So we have a work around: polling those providers ever X minutes asking for new emails, and triggering local notifications – but we can’t hook into a native Push Notification process like your banking app for example. This is under the IMAP implementation. The JMAP implementation (think modern email protocols) has something in place we can more readily consume.  Another challenge is how the battery is affected by how often we poll the providers, and we need specific permissions from Google to run this process in the background.  Those permissions changed recently which is why Notifications are having issues.

I’ve simplified some pieces here, but hopefully that gives you an idea of some of the complexity and tradeoffs that we are working with.  With all of that said, this is very important to us, and is our users’ biggest pain point.  It is becoming our biggest need for a fix.  I’ll give an update on where that sits within the roadmap next progress report when we have explored what solutions we can provide.

iOS Progress

For the iOS roadmap, everything is moving along well.  We have been wrapping up most of our IMAP & SMTP tickets, and we are moving into the Account Data pieces to manage accounts and authorizations.  We will also be having a new member join us in the next couple of weeks.  This will add some speed, but we’ve made good progress in getting the inner pieces together – what I consider the most complex parts.  As we move to more standard mobile backend pieces and more standard UI, we leave the world of unknown unknowns, and will be picking up steam.

At a high level our iOS roadmap is build out these screens:

• Account Setup and Drawer
• Messages: List, Reader, Compose, Search

And have these pieces in place: 

• IMAP
• SMTP
• MIME
• OAuth
• Encryption
• Email Composition 

And our target is still end of the year for the iOS release.  

Thank You!

Again we are so grateful to you, our community, for your support, and we are excited for this next quarter as we start to see the fruits of our labors.  

The post Mobile Progress Report – April 2026 appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

The first Mobile Progress Report of 2026 provides a high-level overview to our mobile plans and priorities for the coming year.

Android

Our primary focus this year revolves around a better user experience and includes a major push to improve quality. We want to make the app stable, reduce our bugs, and speed up our development process. To do this, we have to make some big changes and improvements to the app’s basic structure and database. We’re moving toward modern Android standards, which includes using technologies like Compose and creating a single, consistent design system for our User Interface.

But we don’t want a year of just code fixes; we know we need to add features, especially around messaging & notifications.  We’re making sure we deliver features and improve the user experience along the way. It’s a tricky balance between making the app better for users and overhauling the inner workings. We think these changes are worth the investment because they’ll lead to a better app, and ultimately, a better app for everyone. So the focus is better quality and simplifying the code to make us quicker.

Thunderbird has a new product – Thunderbird Pro – and as it comes more online, we plan to connect the Android app to it.

Here are our priorities for the year. P1 is the top focus:

P1

• Get the Android app into a state that’s easier to maintain
• Improve the database structure
• Message List & View improvements
• Unified Account
• Unified Design System (for both iOS and Android)

P2

• HTML signatures
• Looking into JMAP support

P3

• Looking into Exchange support
• Calendar exploration

iOS

The main thing we’re trying to do for iOS this year is successfully launch Version 1 of our app. That sounds simple, but it involves building a lot of complicated, low-level foundational things.

This quarter, we’re concentrating on finishing up the IMAP and SMTP pieces, getting our design system established, and building the basic UI so we can start using these pieces. After that, we’ll shift to implementing OAuth. This will stop users from having to use confusing processes, like creating an app token, and let them sign in easily through the standard account import process with a simple User Interface.

Once we have IMAP and OAuth ready, we’ll have the absolute bare minimum for a mail app, allowing users to send and receive email. But there are other features you’d expect in a mail app, like mailboxes, signatures, rich text viewing, attachment handling, and the compose experience. We’ve already made great progress on the underlying functionality, and we have a clear vision of what needs to be implemented to make this successful.

Our key priorities for iOS are:

P1

• Account creation flow
• IMAP support
• Full email writing and reading experience

P2

• JMAP support
• HTML signatures

It’s exciting to see the momentum that the iOS app is gaining and to get a clearer picture of what we need to do for the Android app to simplify things. We are getting farther on fewer, more targeted goals. I look forward to communicating with you over the next few months and share the progress that we are making. 
—

Jon Bott (he/him)

Manager, Mobile Apps

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

A Brief Self-Introduction

Hello community, it’s a pleasure to be here and help take part in a product I’ve used for many years, but now with the focus on Mobile.  I am Jon Bott, and am the new Engineering Manager for the Thunderbird Mobile teams.  I am passionate about native mobile development and am excited to be helping both mobile apps moving forward.  

Refining our Roadmaps

For now, as we develop, we are refining the roadmap and making more concrete plans for iOS Thunderbird’s Alpha release in a couple of months, and finalizing our initial pass with Account Drawer on the Android (planned for release in the next beta).  We also have Notification and Message List improvements under development.

Carpaccio

As a mobile product, we’ve gone through several changes over the last year or so, from large annual releases, to our more recent monthly beta and release process.  Our next steps are to start sizing our features so they fit better into that monthly cadence, and you’ll see the benefits of this over the next few months as we simplify our planning & process – breaking our large features into smaller, more frequently delivered pieces.  This is based on the Carpaccio method for breaking down features into thin slices with the goal of delivering usable features to our users more quickly, and focusing more on the iterative process helping us take feedback sooner from the community on a feature experience and designs.  Not everything will fit in this, of course, but more will go out sooner as we carve away with our larger goals for the platforms.

Stay Tuned

Over the next few weeks we’ll update our timelines and roadmaps, to what pieces we have high confidence in delivering over the next few months, and a 50,000 foot (15,000 meter) view of our larger pieces we hope to tackle in the next year.  Ultimately our goal is to more quickly reduce pain points you might have, and keep adding polish to Thunderbird’s mobile experience. 

Progress with Thunderbird iOS

We are excited to show the progress we are making in getting the iOS up and running.  Some things are connected, others have sample data for now, but it helps us move quickly and start to share what the UI will be like moving forward.  Here are the actual screen we’ve coded up:

____

Jon Bott

Manager, Mobile Apps

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