Thunderbird for Android: Should You Upgrade From K-9 Mail? [Office Hours Clip] 

When Thunderbird for Android is ready for release, how will you upgrade from K-9 Mail? Will you even need to? Will both apps co-exist? Where does Mozilla Sync fit in? Alex answers a lot of burning questions about our Android plans. [Deutsche Untertitel verfügbar]
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TRANSCRIPT:
Monica
When Thunderbird for Android is ready to be released. Um, what is the upgrade path going to be?
Alex
Um, so we are going to keep K-9 and Thunderbird for Android released in parallel. The code base is the same with material 3. We are, um, we can easily do a theme, a brand switch between the two, and release two completely separate apps. This was done for many reasons. One reason is we have a somewhat substantial, uh, K-9 user base that they express their desire to keep canine. They like the brand. They don't care about Thunderbird at all. Um. So we want to keep supporting that. The other, more technical reason is that Google doesn't like when you have an app ID that says something, and then you suddenly switch an app from one thing to another. So we couldn't do it. Um, and rather than saying at one point, okay, we're gonna stop supporting K-9 now, you're forced to switch on the Android. We can very easily. There's no engineering overhead. We can very easily release the same updates, same security updates, same new features on both apps at the same time. And we're going to keep it this way for maybe a year or two. As I said, there's no engineering overhead. So it's very easy for us to keep supporting the same like two different apps at the same time, because there's the same code base. Once the maturity level of Thunderbird for Android and Canine is at a point that we're extremely satisfied and we're confident that we see users naturally transitioning towards Thunderbird for Android and seeing the users adoption growing one point in one side and, uh, diminishing another side. We will prompt K-9 users to migrate to Thunderbird for Android, and we can do it in two ways.
Alex
First of all, the initial step is what we're doing right now already is implementing, uh, Mozilla accounts and, uh, Mozilla sync, which means that if you log in with your sync account in canine, you sync all your things. Then you open Thunderbird for Android, you log in with your sync account automatically, all your sync data will be reinstalled. So all your accounts, your tags, your settings, uh, all the things that we will support will be there. So the migration path is very frictionless. You don't need any extra tool or any extra things. Um, another thing that we want to explore is one tap migrate from canine to, um, Thunderbird for Android that. Really depends on the limitations of the platform. Android. For security reason, uh, one application cannot access the profile of another application. There's containerized and separate. So that's a technical limitation. But hopefully with Mozilla Account we will be able to overcome any of those limitations. And we can offer just a pop up in K-9 that says, hey, Thunderbird for Android will be the future. Please transition there. Just tap. If you have installed, we automatically log in into your Mozilla account. We ask for the password, of course, because we don't know your password and all your data will be there, so we definitely are. Trying to find the most frictionless workflow ever to allow you to just transition without losing anything, and not even realizing that you switched up other than just a brand change, basically.
Monica
So are the monthly developer updates. So where would the best place for people to go if they want to kind of continual updates on this transition process?
Alex
Uh, yeah, definitely. In our blog, a blog at Thunderbird dot net. Once a month we release, uh, K-9 updates. cketti Uh, the previews sole maintainer of, uh, K-9 is doing these monthly updates. Um, if you're interested in seeing progress and testing new features early as faster you can. If you're on F-droid, you can install the beta. You can download the APK, install the beta. If you're on Google Play, you can access the Google Play Store and join the beta channel. We are experimenting and trying to create a alpha channel, a sort of like daily release. Um, but before we do that, we need to improve a little bit. Our release process right now is very manual. We want to automate it a little bit more with CI CD and all this good stuff. But um, yeah, definitely use the beta. It's very stable for being beta and you will get exposed to super cool new features earlier than regular users.