The app is still named K9 in your launcher, right?
The app is still named K9 in Android Settings - Apps, right?
The only place it’s named wrong is in F-Droid, and that will be fixed soon.
The app is still named K9 in your launcher, right?
The app is still named K9 in Android Settings - Apps, right?
The only place it’s named wrong is in F-Droid, and that will be fixed soon.
Nope. If that would have been the case I wouldn’t have posted my messages. No app in my launcher for either K9mail or Thunderbird.
@bovergaauw ???
No, there is no app in any list with the name K9mail or Thunderbird
that’s odd… and nothing to do with F-Droid
Whatever is currently going on with the fdroid release of k9 mail is a serious issue and needs to be fixed.
Having an app turn into a different one with the same app ID and suggest an upgrade (or even just look at that way) should be treated as a critical security failure for both the app and fdroid itself.
Only that no app has changed, just the text in one app (F-Droid) and one website (f-droid.org) is wrong… because the app developer pushed the wrong button.
There’s no need for panic or mentions of security…
I didn’t have time to read back. I should have worded a bit more carefully, “…K-9 Mail is ALREADY an Android version of Thunderbird”.
I must admit I was surprised, I’ve been using K-9 for ten years and the change of ownership was pretty seamless.
Maybe we should ask @cketti that question, he seem to be involved in he project? I do hope K-9 continues as a FOSS application or I’ll be looking for another client.
And they’ll say “at this moment we intend to… blahlblahblhba” and that’s fine, all I’m saying is that things might change in the future, never expect promises, so you don’t get disappointed
That’s life!
If there’s no review mechanism that will catch a title and description change to literally a completely different app, what mechanism will prevent pushing a malicious package?
You mean what if the Mozilla repos are hacked and malicious source code is pushed and F-Droid builds it?
You mean if the Mozilla servers are hacked and a malicious package is pushed to Google Play?
Yes, you are right… nothing can be done.
Oh wa-
Thunderbird is built reproducible (read: Inclusion How-To | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository) so… if the source is poisoned either Mozilla built the same poisoned version (so all users are poisoned) or F-Droid will fail to verify it and not update its users to this bad version.
K9 unfortunately is not set like this, I mean it could, but this needs the user to uninstall and reinstall the app, if @cketti decides to switch it to being reproducible. Not an easy task to ask of ones users.
According to Frequently Asked Questions: Thunderbird Mobile and K-9 Mail K-9 will be maintained for approximately 1 year from now on.
"Additionally, we plan to continue maintaining and releasing K-9 Mail for approximately one year after the release of Thunderbird for Android. "
We can’t prevent that. We only make sure that the apk is built from the source code. We don’t review the source code.
Hey folks,
my sincere apologies for the confusion this has caused. I’ll start out with saying this indeed wasn’t intentional. We have recently set up some build automation that was supposed to change a symlink to point to the correct metadata, but it didn’t. Therefore when f-droid built K-9 Mail, it took the metadata from the wrong directory, and the listing was updated with the wrong content.
Despite f-droid saying an update from K-9 Mail to Thunderbird is available, you still have K-9 Mail installed (com.fsck.k9), and you will have received a K-9 Mail build as it is intended to be. Note however that K-9 Mail and Thunderbird are on the same code base, so you won’t see a major difference in functionality or looks at the moment. There are a few common complaints you might point out that are covered in various github issues that we’ll be working on smoothing out shortly.
We did an emergency build yesterday to trigger an f-droid update, and the f-droid team graciously restarted the build cycle for us. Once the cycle is through (max 2-3 days), K-9 Mail will be restored to its original listing.
In terms of future maintenance, it isn’t reasonable to say we’d maintain K-9 Mail for ever and ever, but before we make any erratic changes we’d like to see how Thunderbird evolves. For the time being, no matter if you prefer the looks of Thunderbird or K-9 Mail, you’ll be able to follow releases in either app.
The apps are built on the same code base, and there are a few features enabled in Thunderbird that don’t make sense in the context of K-9 Mail. If you’d like to have a voice in direction I’d encourage you to install Thunderbird Beta and stay in touch via the relevant channels linked in our README.
Hi @kewisch,
Thanks for the explanation. For me and others who don’t know, could you please say which features are enabled in Thunderbird which aren’t in K-9? For now I’d probably rather stick with K-9 just to avoid another job to do in migrating, but if there are features I’d like to use then I’m more likely to make the jump.
Cheers
I have both k9 and thunder on my phone. Visually, there is little difference. Thunder includes various Google binaries, but there is a F-droid flavor without them.
Speaking of Thunderbird generally: I have it on my Linux PC. What I don’t like about it is: when you uninstall the app, even when using Linux ‘total removal’, lt leaves your login metadata intact. In other words, if you reinstall the app, all your acounts would still be there. I hope this ‘feature’ won’t find its way into Android version.
Installed update to K9mail, got my lauch item back, everything is back to normal
Note that it takes time for mirrors to sync, so if the icon is still blue that’s the issue.
Website is still updating, have patience.