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Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

blog.thunderbird.net

61–70 of 296 posts

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#61
post #38

I'm continually creeped out by all the PR sugarcoating on what essentially are simple notices of acquisition. So all this is in effect saying is that K9 got acquired by Mozilla and will be integrated into the suite of Mozilla products. The justification given in the post is just non-information, because you could say this for almost any pair of software products if you define the terms fuzzily enough: > The Thunderbi…

> isn't this exactly one of the things that the app store rules are supposed to protect against? Umm, no? There's never been a rule about an app developer selling their app/company - that'd be pretty badly restrictive.

I don't think the selling part is the problem (per se), I mean the app becoming something completely different after the acquisition, which users never consciously installed.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#62
post #38

I'm continually creeped out by all the PR sugarcoating on what essentially are simple notices of acquisition. So all this is in effect saying is that K9 got acquired by Mozilla and will be integrated into the suite of Mozilla products. The justification given in the post is just non-information, because you could say this for almost any pair of software products if you define the terms fuzzily enough: > The Thunderbi…

> the app suddenly morphs into app Y which has a different branding, different UI, different features, a different backend and a different development team (but still has your data), isn't this exactly one of the things that the app store rules are supposed to protect against?

https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/1/23149832/google-meet-duo-c...

> Pretty soon, the Duo app will get an update that brings an onslaught of Meet features into the platform; later this year, the Duo app will be renamed Google Meet. The current Meet app will be called “Meet Original,” and eventually deprecated.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#63

Long time Thunderbird in Linux user, had to switch to Mutt a few months ago. Having 3 inboxes configured was taking, for some reason, +10Gb of disk and several Gb of RAM, plus being painfully slow and freeze pretty often.

I eventually had to switch off Thunderbird as well for similar reasons and just live with mutt. TB just really didn't perform well at all on large mailboxes (dozens of folders, thousands of messages per folder) without freezing the UI, gobbling gigabytes of ram, etc - it is obviously not targeted at my use case.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#64
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguing for electron on hn? Brave. (I like electron fwiw, it's enabled me to have a desktop experience with applications that would've otherwise never come to linux)

>Arguing for electron on hn? Brave. Thank you for recognizing this. I admit I had a moment of doubt before pressing "submit". :)

Keep in mind electron is just one way to go. There's Tauri for example, offering a very similar solution.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#65
post #58
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguing for electron on hn? Brave. (I like electron fwiw, it's enabled me to have a desktop experience with applications that would've otherwise never come to linux)

Email clients need to display full html/css/js now

Which email clients don't block JavaScript by default? I quickly searched just now and couldn't find any.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#66
As a Thunderbird and K-9 user this is 51% good news and 49% possibly bad new.

Good news because it should increase the chances that the two products will live a longer life.

Possibly bad news because I'm one of the crowd that went back to K-9 5.600 because the new version destroyed the UI that was the primary reason why we picked K-9 over other apps. 100% self selection bias here. There was maybe an ongoing effort to offer the old interface as an option. I'm not sure Mozilla's going to invest into that. On the other side, the way I'm using Thunderbird is very close to the old K-9.

A wish: an IMAP server backed by Thundebird's local storage and K-9 as client.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#67
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> isn't this exactly one of the things that the app store rules are supposed to protect against? Umm, no? There's never been a rule about an app developer selling their app/company - that'd be pretty badly restrictive.

I don't think the selling part is the problem (per se), I mean the app becoming something completely different after the acquisition, which users never consciously installed.

While not commonplace, it's not unheard of for app UI/UXes to be changed completely over an update.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#69

As an aside, Thunderbird occupies that uncomfortable space of software that is libre, but seems so bloated and complex I don't want to install it, let alone work on it. I'm not sure if that perception is "accurate" (which of course depends on how you define things). But think of OpenOffice/LibreOffice. It's a huge, classically written C++ blob that is hard to check out hard to build and hard to contribute to. Yet, it…

I will not use an Electron app if I can find literally any other kind of app. Bloated, slow, buggy, difficult desktop/Linux integration.

Re: Our plans for Thunderbird on Android

#70
post #38

I'm continually creeped out by all the PR sugarcoating on what essentially are simple notices of acquisition. So all this is in effect saying is that K9 got acquired by Mozilla and will be integrated into the suite of Mozilla products. The justification given in the post is just non-information, because you could say this for almost any pair of software products if you define the terms fuzzily enough: > The Thunderbi…

Thunderbird Product Manager here. We have no intention to replace the backend or most of the components. It will not be a different app. It's still run by the K-9 project maintainer. The difference? We didn't want to see K-9 die because of a lack of funding, and our visions were aligned - so it made sense to work together. That's it. Thunderbird is community run (unlike Firefox, our community representatives approve our team's budget and goals), so our aims are just to provide for our users and community what they want. And they want to use email on their phones as well as desktop.

The way you present it sounds devious. But we're just truly trying to work together in the open source ecosystem the best we can and put our resources to their best use.

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