The first Mobile Progress Report of 2026 provides a high-level overview to our mobile plans and priorities for the coming year.

Android

Our primary focus this year revolves around a better user experience and includes a major push to improve quality. We want to make the app stable, reduce our bugs, and speed up our development process. To do this, we have to make some big changes and improvements to the app’s basic structure and database. We’re moving toward modern Android standards, which includes using technologies like Compose and creating a single, consistent design system for our User Interface.

But we don’t want a year of just code fixes; we know we need to add features, especially around messaging & notifications. We’re making sure we deliver features and improve the user experience along the way. It’s a tricky balance between making the app better for users and overhauling the inner workings. We think these changes are worth the investment because they’ll lead to a better app, and ultimately, a better app for everyone. So the focus is better quality and simplifying the code to make us quicker.

Thunderbird has a new product – Thunderbird Pro – and as it comes more online, we plan to connect the Android app to it.

Here are our priorities for the year. P1 is the top focus:

P1

• Get the Android app into a state that’s easier to maintain
• Improve the database structure
• Message List & View improvements
• Unified Account
• Unified Design System (for both iOS and Android)

P2

• HTML signatures
• Looking into JMAP support

P3

• Looking into Exchange support
• Calendar exploration

iOS

The main thing we’re trying to do for iOS this year is successfully launch Version 1 of our app. That sounds simple, but it involves building a lot of complicated, low-level foundational things.

This quarter, we’re concentrating on finishing up the IMAP and SMTP pieces, getting our design system established, and building the basic UI so we can start using these pieces. After that, we’ll shift to implementing OAuth. This will stop users from having to use confusing processes, like creating an app token, and let them sign in easily through the standard account import process with a simple User Interface.

Once we have IMAP and OAuth ready, we’ll have the absolute bare minimum for a mail app, allowing users to send and receive email. But there are other features you’d expect in a mail app, like mailboxes, signatures, rich text viewing, attachment handling, and the compose experience. We’ve already made great progress on the underlying functionality, and we have a clear vision of what needs to be implemented to make this successful.

Our key priorities for iOS are:

P1

• Account creation flow
• IMAP support
• Full email writing and reading experience

P2

• JMAP support
• HTML signatures

It’s exciting to see the momentum that the iOS app is gaining and to get a clearer picture of what we need to do for the Android app to simplify things. We are getting farther on fewer, more targeted goals. I look forward to communicating with you over the next few months and share the progress that we are making.
—

Jon Bott (he/him)

Manager, Mobile Apps

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