The Thunderbird open source email project is making huge strides. After readying the first mobile version of Thunderbird for Android, the team has set its sight on the second big mobile operation system Apple iOS.
The details:
- The repository of Thunderbird for iOS is not publicly available on GitHub.
- The developers aim for an alpha release of the mobile client in late 2025.
Philipp Kewisch, mobile engineer at MLZA Technologies, the organization behind Thunderbird, revealed the good news officially in a message.
The project is just at the beginning and the developers are not openly looking for code contributors at this stage.
Kewisch explains the next steps that are going to happen:
What is next? We’re simultaneously working on some of the iOS essentials and architecture prep. These are all the basics of what types of objects and interfaces do we need, how do they play together, what does the database look like, etc. We’ll start sharing some preliminary details on this soon and give you the opportunity to share your feedback.
This means that it will take a while before iOS users can get their hands on a public prototype of the email app for their mobile operating system.
The greater picture is interesting though. One of Thunderbird’s main weaknesses up until now was lack of support for mobile apps. Mobile users had to use a different email client or access web-based email instead to access emails on mobile.
The release of the Android client and the future release of the iOS client closes that gap.
To make this a true contender for Gmail or Outlook, Thunderbird’s team is also working on a web email service.