Mozilla Thunderbird is Coming to iOS Later This Year

The Mozilla Thunderbird team has announced plans to release a beta version of its email client on iOS later this year. A beta version of Thunderbird for Android was released back in October following a long development process that saw the foundation take over the existing K-9 Mail Android app.

The Thunderbird team first discussed Thunderbird for iOS in January, but the team’s latest progress report published last week (via How to Geek) included more details on the project. In short, it’s still early days for the iOS app, but work on the new client will speed up once the team hires a dedicated developer to work on the app.

“We’ve been working on some basic architectural decisions and plan to publish a barebones repository on GitHub soon (…) With this upcoming hire, we plan to have alpha code available on Test Flight by the end of the year. To set expectations up front, functionality will be quite basic. A lof of work goes into writing an email application from scratch. We’re going to be focusing on a basic display of email messages, and then expanding to triage actions. Sending basic emails is also on our list,” the Thunderbird team explained.

If iOS now makes it easy to set another default email client, there’s already strong competition with Outlook, Gmail, and Apple Mail, which are all being upgraded with generative AI features. While Thunderbird still has its fans on the desktop, the Android version of the email client only crossed over 100,000 downloads on the Google Play Store as of this writing. The K-9 Mail open-source email client that the Mozilla Foundation acquired remains available to download on the Play Store, and it has crossed over 5 million downloads to this day.