I don’t think thunderbird can be expected to work on the Librem or any other phone-type hardware.
Thunderbird is barely maintained as it is, and the resource requirements are quite steep.
But mostly, it’s close to impossible to make the UI work properly, which means a whole new UI would have to be developed.
That’s the reason Mozilla basically rewrote Firefox for Android.
The use some of the same backend libraries, but the whole UI and many other parts are a full rewrite and desktop Firefox shares much less code with Android Firefox than people expect.
Well I do receive updates on a regular basis (I don’t read the changelogs anymore since I don’t care that much about modifications on Thunderbird as long as it gets security updates).
I think that most of the differences between Firefox on Linux and Firefox on Android are due to the use of Java and not really due to UI since Mozilla used a slightly modified Firefox on Firefox OS (not as much as the java/Android version) and it worked pretty well.
At first the support for Firefox and Thunderbird on mobile Linux might probably be done by the community but if we get a significant enough market share Mozilla might pick it up and squeeze the UI.
FIrefox desktop and Firefox Android share the core rendering engine (Gecko) but many other parts are different: all the “chrome” UI is in Java for the Android version instead of XUL for the Destktop one.
About Firefox OS, it was neither java nor XUL, but full HTML, sharing absolutely no UI code with the desktop and android versions.
2 Likes
Good to know, I didn’t know that Mozilla got through the trouble of creating multiple versions of Firefox but did not recycled the code.
About recent and future development of Thunderbird :
Youtube has DRM and it works, why not Amazon Prime?
Instead of Thunderbird you can use Evolution, which also can cope with Office365 / MS Exchange accounts.
And even with TFA.
Greetings.