I'm continually creeped out by all the PR sugarcoating on what essentially are simple notices of acquisition. So all this is in effect saying is that K9 got acquired by Mozilla and will be integrated into the suite of Mozilla products.
The justification given in the post is just non-information, because you could say this for almost any pair of software products if you define the terms fuzzily enough:
> The Thunderbird team had many discussions on how we might provide a great mobile experience for our users. In the end, we didn’t want to duplicate effort if we could combine forces with an existing open-source project that shared our values. Over years of discussing ways K-9 and Thunderbird could collaborate, we decided it would best serve our users to work together.
I don't want to say this is bad for K9, bit I still wonder what will happen to existing K9 installs.
If you install Android app X and, due to an acquisition, the app suddenly morphs into app Y which has a different branding, different UI, different features, a different backend and a different development team (but still has your data), isn't this exactly one of the things that the app store rules are supposed to protect against?
Thunderbird Product Manager here. We have no intention to replace the backend or most of the components. It will not be a different app. It's still run by the K-9 project maintainer. The difference? We didn't want to see K-9 die because of a lack of funding, and our visions were aligned - so it made sense to work together. That's it. Thunderbird is community run (unlike Firefox, our community representatives approve our team's budget and goals), so our aims are just to provide for our users and community what they want. And they want to use email on their phones as well as desktop.
The way you present it sounds devious. But we're just truly trying to work together in the open source ecosystem the best we can and put our resources to their best use.
This is great. I am glad K9 will live on. I didn't think it wouldn't anyway because frankly K9 is established software and Thunderbird doesn't seem to have anything in that space. It wouldn't make sense to kill it and redo it. This is not Microsoft after all, which would take the product and cripple it so much that it has one third the features and the Microsoft name.
However this particular deal sounds a lot like white labeling, don't you think ? :)
Hi Ryan, nice seeing you here. If you don't mind, would love to hear your thoughts:
I’m missing a story about mobile Linux. Has this been discussed; is this something on the roadmap?
There are already excellent e-mail options for iOS. Right now there is almost nothing outside of the cli that’s usable on mobile Linux. Thunderbird would have a chance of being the main choice while helping adoption of mobile Linux in the medium-to long-term.
I understand it’s not realistic to expect anything anytime soon, but I do hope this is being discussed and that we will see a strategy for it.
Have you tried Geary on mobile Linux? I haven't (no pinephone or similar), so I'm sincerely asking. It works well in a very narrow window on desktop Linux, so that seems hopeful? I wonder if it's excessively memory hungry or syncs mail inefficiently, though.
If anyone wants a free pinephone + will use it for something useful (and is prepared to pay the postage from Melbourne, Australia), then they're welcome to mine.
I bought one a few months ago to support the project but never ended up using it. It's still sitting in a drawer.
Realistically, there's no hope I'll ever do anything with it myself. ;)
Sounds great, if no takers yet! I’ve been meaning to do some PostMarketOS dev and it’s one of the primary supported devices. I’m at the other end of the world though, so if someone closer is interested that’d make more sense! Mail is in profile.
It's the most viable and promising so far I think. I have too many directories for it to be usable without some new features, though (namely highlight dirs with new mail and more filtering capabilities). It's practically unusable, but granted I may have an unusual setup. If you just have a handful of active folders it might be great.
Didn't notice any surprising syncing issues so far.
If anyone is getting a sense of deja vu, it's because this is was Outlook mobile strategy. Microsoft acquired a popular third-party Exchange mail client for iOS/Android, named Acompli, and rebranded it to Outlook.
>We have no intention to replace the backend or most of the components.
So sayeth every acquiring company about the acquired. I can think of very few that it held true. Maybe this can be added to the list, but only time will tell. I wouldn't suggest people holding their breath though
>These aren't companies. It's a communty project and a FOSS project merging resources.
Exactly how other situations historically have started. Lot's of FOSS projects "brought into the fold" to "shepard" along only to not get the resources promised.
Just take care that K-9 development doesn't get bogged down in well meant feature ports/unifications that end up being negative value for anyone who isn't fully committed to running their entire life through Thunderbird and K-9, in the most synchronized way. For example the not really in scope but also not really out of scope nature of calendar in Thunderbird should better not spread to K-9 I think (as someone who has never used K-9, but is on Thunderbird since Communicator 4). But if you succeed avoiding that pitfall, if it's really just "we would love to do something on mobile, but we would hate to steal attention from K-9", then it's certainly just applaudable lack of NIH, nice!
Thanks to both you and KMail team. This merger makes tons of sense as both clients made it through some dark years and have both come out on top with amazing improvements. I'm really excited to see what the combined team delivers!
So if it won't change, what is the point of this? I get that Thunderbird (Mozilla corp) wants a mobile client, but if its just the same horrible app with a rebrand, what does it actually offer (since desktop thunderbird is still pretty awful and recently has got to the point where gmail is preferable)?
> It will not be a different app. It's still run by the K-9 project maintainer. The difference? We didn't want to see K-9 die because of a lack of funding, and our visions were aligned
Nothing in this world is purely altruistic. If it didn't make business sense, this wouldn't be happening. Please surprise me and stay true to your word on this.
> The way you present it sounds devious. But we're just truly trying to work together in the open source ecosystem the best we can and put our resources to their best use.
We are all from the internet here, you know exactly why we are this way. Even if true, please understand why your words are perceived this way.
What business sense do you have in mind? Thunderbird is funded by donations and governed by volunteers. Even if this were some kind of money grab, who's grabbing what money?
Isn't the business reason that they would rather acquire an existing mail app that is similar to what they had in mind rather than building a brand new one themselves?
From Mozilla's previous attempts to jettison Thunderbird, and the period where the community kept it maintained while Mozilla allocated no resources, the relationship between Thunderbird and Mozilla these days is more akin to that between something like GNU or ASF and their projects than a company and its direct project.
While yes Mozilla could theoretically enforce its trademarks and appoint its own team to start making more direct decisions, we've seen how that goes with various ex-GNU projects like libreboot or ASF projects where they don't have the community like OpenOffice
> If you install Android app X and, due to an acquisition, the app suddenly morphs into app Y which has a different branding, different UI, different features, a different backend and a different development team (but still has your data), isn't this exactly one of the things that the app store rules are supposed to protect against?
On my phone currently, this applies to the following apps:
* Element
* Free Now (European taxi app bought out by BMW/Daimler, formerly mytaxi, formerly hailo)
* Google Hangouts (Was installed as Talk)
* WhatsApp (now Facebook owned)
* A local cinema chain bought out by a UK + Ireland chain
Element did not change ownership. They've just had a few confusing name changes. And the (same) people behind the client are trying to commercialise the client but not the network behind it where your data actually is.
I never understood why they dropped vector as a name. It wasn't a worse name than element. Riot was a terrible name choice however. Sooner or later it would have got caught up being used by people coordinating a protest or something and the press would have had a field day with it.
But your data has never left the matrix network or your own home server if you chose to have one.
RiotX? I don't remember that. There was a TelegramX, maybe this is what you mean? However there was a couple years that I didn't use it much so perhaps I missed it.
But it did go from Vector -> Riot -> Element and various UI and branding changes along the way yes :) Part of this is also that the app was not really "finished" back in the Vector days. It only really came into its own during the Riot age. For example E2E encryption didn't yet exist at the start, and the underlying support in Matrix was missing as well. It's still a protocol and toolset that's evolving rapidly.
However the benefit of Matrix is that you can choose any client you want, there are several for mobiles.
The app that is now the Element Android app co-existed with the old Riot app for over a year as "RiotX". The rebrand and app changeover were timed together, so they renamed the RiotX app to the Element app and replaced the old Riot app with it in one go.
RiotX existed as an experimental client alongside the original Riot, the intention was always to replace Riot with RiotX and this was made very clear (The original java implementation sucked, although what has become Element still has its many many problems)
> the app suddenly morphs into app Y which has a different branding, different UI, different features, a different backend and a different development team (but still has your data), isn't this exactly one of the things that the app store rules are supposed to protect against?
> Pretty soon, the Duo app will get an update that brings an onslaught of Meet features into the platform; later this year, the Duo app will be renamed Google Meet. The current Meet app will be called “Meet Original,” and eventually deprecated.
I don't think the selling part is the problem (per se), I mean the app becoming something completely different after the acquisition, which users never consciously installed.
I've just learned (one benefit of not automatically updating everything) that the app I've used for syncing music from iTunes to my Android phone [1] plus the associated music player app have been sold to some unscrupulous developers who have apparently proceeded to immediately re-add ads into the paid-for (!) versions, re-adding the the file sync limits that originally only applied to the free trial version and things like that and (instead of the former one-time purchase) are now demanding something on the order of 30 $ or so per month (!!) in order to unlock the former paid-for features again.
It'd be nice if there actually was a rule against something like that…
[1] The key features for why I didn't just use a simple file sync was that it supported bi-directional syncing of play counts, ratings and for podcasts also the playback position.
Is it iSyncr + Rocket Player? I am in the same boat if so. Have the paid versions and don't see ads at the moment, but the "Rate Me" popups are a bad sign.
Good guess, yes. :-) From a brief look it seems that these days (I don't think it was around when I first looked a few years ago) MusicBee instead of iTunes on desktop and GoneMAD Music Player might work as a similar combo with bi-directional play count and ratings sync (although I've found somebody saying that this didn't actually work on a latest Android version [1], so hmm...), but it seems the podcasts handling might not work as it currently does.
The problem is that while I don't need the podcasts syncing for regular podcasts (for which a separate podcasts app on my phone would be perfectly fine, and besides I don't listen all that much to podcasts that way anyway), I'm also managing my collection of radio comedies I've scrounged together from all sorts of places as podcasts in iTunes (by simply manually setting the media type to "Podcast" – luckily on Windows, where iTunes hasn't been split up into its components this is still possible), so that
a) they're all together in one place and not cluttering up the music part of my library
b) especially to get the nice at-a-glance listened/not listened/partially listened display, and
c) while iTunes allows setting the "Remember my playback position" for any kind of file, Rocket Player apparently supports remembering the playback position only for podcasts
I've got no idea how GoneMAD and MusicBee's file syncing behave in that regard, but a quick test installation of MusicBee showed that while I could get used to it as an iTunes-replacement for my general music library, it doesn't allow manually importing files as podcasts, meaning I'd have to resort either manually hacking the database, or setting up some sort of fake Podcast running on a local HTTP server in order to import new episodes... :-/
At least for now the old versions will keep working, and if some future Android version does break things, I guess I'll decide what to do about it in terms of a replacement at that time and not now…
Though I guess it does mean that my personal main bug in iSyncr [2] won't ever get fixed now, so maybe I need to resort to APK hacking after all…
[1] Which is how I found out about iSyncr + Rocket Player having been sold in the first place.
[2] After a file has been synced, it won't be synced again if any subsequent changes that don't change either of title/artist/album (or possibly file size, but due to metadata padding small metadata changes won't necessarily change the total file size) happen within 24 hours [3] of the original sync.
[3] I think this is trying to work around the fact that Android reports the file timestamps in local time, so due to either travel or even just summer/winter time a file might suddenly appear as outdated as compared to the last modified timestamp on the desktop. As my desktop with my music library, is in a fixed location, for me 24 hours is excessive, though, and 1 hour to cater for summer/winter time would be enough.
Is there anything in the announcement that says that people who installed K-9 mail would find that it has silently turned into Thunderbird? I'd assume this would involve a separate install, as it'll probably have a separate app ID indicating the Thunderbird connection.
In any case, I've had installed apps have the name change as a part of rebranding before. It's a little bit jarring sometimes, but name changes happen. They're usually small name changes, but I don't thing taking "K-9 mail is continuing development with a new name" as "app becoming something completely different" is really fair. Unless the functionality and UX completely changes, I don't think it's fair to read a name change as something so negative that needs to be "protected against".
They probably will provide message written in "big friendly letters" on a welcome screen at some point where it will be explained that K9 becomes Thunderbird, and how great that is for you as the user. Either they'll update the client or ask users to download new one and migrate - not sure how that happens on Android.
Will that help? Not sure. Mozilla seems to have weird goals nowadays.
Anyway, I'm so fed up with empty terms like "experiences" and "excitement" all around in IT. But guess that's what happens when you let marketing dictate way too many things in software development.
The justification given in the post is just non-information, because you could say this for almost any pair of software products if you define the terms fuzzily enough:
> The Thunderbird team had many discussions on how we might provide a great mobile experience for our users. In the end, we didn’t want to duplicate effort if we could combine forces with an existing open-source project that shared our values. Over years of discussing ways K-9 and Thunderbird could collaborate, we decided it would best serve our users to work together.
I don't want to say this is bad for K9, bit I still wonder what will happen to existing K9 installs.
If you install Android app X and, due to an acquisition, the app suddenly morphs into app Y which has a different branding, different UI, different features, a different backend and a different development team (but still has your data), isn't this exactly one of the things that the app store rules are supposed to protect against?