They have been the same team for the past 2 years. I think they have done a pretty good job developing new features thoughtfully and improving the user experience. One thing I'm really enjoying about this release is that they have made it much faster to toggle between accounts.
If they are confident adding their branding, then I take it as a show of confidence in their work.
Speaking off, I'm still having issues adding it, since it still get confused by the k9 original repo origin, even if i try to filter the pre-release .apk's with the thunderbird name.
My bad, still kept the k9-mail repo instead of the thunderbird fork.
I'm not sure, but that could be connected to the name change K9➡️Thunderbird. They have said that they will maintain parallel releases of both (identical except for the name/branding) for the immediate future. This release appears to be the identical but may (or may not) solve the issue.
What do you mean? This is perfectly modern. Material UI and minimal, outline style icon theme. That's all the rage with web devs nowadays. Amazing.
(Not that there's anything wrong with that in this case, that's the Android style after all. But personally I heavily dislike Material UI.)
I would say that this UI is ugly though. Spacing is all over the place, the icons don't look cohesive at all apart from the colors used (for example, rounded vs sharp corners), the yellowed paper looking background color, overuse of bold/italic/colored text (especially multiple of those at the same time), inconsistent display of the same thing (in one screenshot the mailbox name is displayed as "Gmail", in the other as "[Gmail]"). And so on.
But that doesn't mean it's "outdated", this would have been equally as bad 10 years ago.
(I just have a knee jerk reaction to people saying "outdated UI" because usually it's used as a justification to replacing perfectly well designed UI with a worse version just so that it follows contemporary design trends. Cf the Windows Settings app.)
That's half the reason I like Thunderbird. Email hasn't changed for 20 years, and neither has Thunderbird's interface. I don't need shadows and 3D effects and stylised colours and buttons, I just want a white page with black text displaying the content of my incoming messages.
The menus are definitely busy and confusing (there are many options), but once it's set up I've never been bothered by the UI.
I quite like how emails are shown OOTB in fact, with the right padding and day separation; I also use most buttons that are offered by default. So yeah, sane defaults.
Off the top of my head what I like:
you can search emails on the server! That's the one feature I couldn't forgo
it detects unsubscribe links
I remember having delays when using K9, with FairEmail not once. This could be fixed now
it cleverly shows you're connected to a VPN (which can be a problem with emails)
maybe too many options, but a lot are actually useful
Not trying to say it's better, to each their own. But it's great.
edit: I received an email at 06:19 in fairemail. it's now 06:56 and I just received it in thunderbird