After years of stumbling without a certain destination, it seems that the situation of Thunderbird is clearing up and that the project has ambitious plans, since its arrival on Android could take place sooner rather than later, according to one of the main people in charge of the application.
The story comes from a Twitter conversion featuring Adam Overa, a staff writer at Tom’s Hardware, and Jason Evangelho, a well-known Linux popularizer and recently Thunderbird marketing manager.
Overa asked in response to the tweet in which Evangelho announced his new position if it was possible to polish the user interface and have a mobile application. Evangelho responded by saying that he was going to ask his now colleagues about the possibility of the email client reaching mobile phones, and Ryan Lee Sipes , manager of product and business development at Thunderbird, appeared there, saying that the mobile application is in road .
The reason why we have said Android at the beginning instead of mobile phones is because Sipes retweeted a montage of Overa in which the phrase “release APK file” , or what comes to the same thing, a installation package for Android.
For now there doesn’t seem to be any more information about it, but seeing the tone of the conversation and the subsequent image published by Ryan Lee Sipes, it’s not unreasonable to think that we could see at least one APK of Thunderbird for Android (not necessarily a stable release). ) during the course of this year, but here we are just speculating with nothing solid.
Thunderbird coming to Android doesn’t have to mean an iOS version has been ruled out, but Mozilla Corporation has much more wiggle room in Google’s system because it allows it to implement its own rendering engine, while in iOS all browsers or applications that make use of web rendering must necessarily support the WebKit imposed by Apple.
Going deeper into the speculation, it is logical to think that the future Thunderbird for Android will reuse the technological base of Firefox for the same operating system: Fenix . This technological base has left users divided between those who praise the improvement in performance that it has brought about compared to what was before and those who criticize the loss of functionalities.
Thunderbird, an email client that once had tens of millions of users and stood out for its ease of use and free software, floundered for years to end up in practically the same place, although under a different organization . Its arrival on Android could be useful, for example, for corporate users, but the fact that the Gmail application comes pre-installed on almost 100% of Android smartphones could discourage its use.
Leave a Reply