Thunderbird, Mozilla’s free and open-source email client is coming to mobile devices. The news was announced on Twitter by Ryan Lee Sipes, a product and business development manager for Thunderbird (via gHacks).
Sipes tweeted that the Thunderbird mobile app is “coming soon,” though that it “may take a while to get all the syncing stuff squared.” The Mozilla employee also added that the team’s number 1 priority was “fixing Thunderbird’s UI/UX”.
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Thunderbird has been around for almost two decades, but just like Mozilla’s Firefox browser, it definitely lost some momentum in recent years. Not so long ago, the Mozilla Foundation also tried to uncouple Thunderbird from Firefox and switch to a community-driven model for email, only to bring back Thunderbird development in-house a couple of years later.
It’s certainly going to be difficult for Thunderbird to compete with established mobile email clients such as Outlook and Gmail. Both apps support multiple accounts just fine, and they also get new features at a regular pace.
In comparison, Thunderbird’s development on the desktop has really slowed down in recent years. On the desktop, Thunderbird also lacks support for Microsoft’s proprietary protocols to access Exchange servers or Office 365, and it requires users to use the IMAP and SMTP standards instead.
Do you Thunderbird coming to mobile devices is better late than never? Let us know what you think in the comments below.