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Can I build my own Thunderbird for Android?

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Can I build my own version of Thunderbird for Android from the Github source? There is a (ridiculous) shortcoming in Thunderbird and also K-9 that seems trivial to fix. Indeed, K-9 does occasionally fix it, only to remove the fix in subsequent versions.

I have some experience with creating Windows applications from Github code, but have no idea how to build an Android app ...

Thanks for any thoughts.

Can I build my own version of Thunderbird for Android from the Github source? There is a (ridiculous) shortcoming in Thunderbird and also K-9 that seems trivial to fix. Indeed, K-9 does occasionally fix it, only to remove the fix in subsequent versions. I have some experience with creating Windows applications from Github code, but have no idea how to build an Android app ... Thanks for any thoughts.

All Replies (9)

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Definitely. Please see https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/wiki/BuildingK9

We'd love to have you contribute a patch.

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Wayne Mery said

We'd love to have you contribute a patch.

Thank you! I'll give this a try.

But it's not a patch I'll be looking to accomplish, just a personal tweak to the UI. I want to undo what I'm sure is a little joke played on us by the developers .. a joke they seem to play every second or third "upgrade".

I'm referring to the colour scheme, where it's just not possible to distinguish between a read message and a selected message. Last version, they were 50% grey and pink; no question which was which. This version, they're 50% grey and 49.5% grey which is realistically the same.

This failure to follow the most basic of "Good UI Guidelines" is astonishing to me, given the most excellent quality of the rest of the application, but here it is, again.

Anyway, thanks for the note.

Alan

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Your readability issue sounds like https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/pull/8387, which was a result of using material 3.

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No, it's not that. Read and unread are (reasonably) easy to tell apart. It's read and selected that's the issue. They both use a VERY similar shade of gray.

An entire page of selected and unread messages is indistinguishable from a page of read and unread messages.

What I don't get is why it was changed. The last version made the selected messages pink, which is to say, completely obvious. Now, pink would not have been my first choice, but it WAS obvious.

Why take the time to make something worse ...

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Sorry, I'm not seeing that, at least on beta.

Where are you seeing these values "50% grey and 49.5% grey" ?

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That said, if you feel there is a bug, please check and post at https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-android/issues

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These numbers are my best guess as to the density. I may have been overly dramatic with my guess, but only a bit. 50% grey and 45% grey might be closer.

Attached (I hope .. new to this forum) are two pics of your most recent messages. One is read, one is selected . Looking at just one message, the unread is obvious, but can you tell the status of the grey message?

I haven't posted this as a bug report because this is not actually a bug, it's just (very) bad UI coding. And a quick internet search shows that this has been a complaint from numerous people for at least four years. It was "fixed" twice, IIRC, but the next upgrade broke it again.

I'm not using the beta, I'm using version 8.0 which was pushed to me by, I assume, the Google Play Store.

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Alan Rothenbush said

I haven't posted this as a bug report because this is not actually a bug, it's just (very) bad UI coding. And a quick internet search shows that this has been a complaint from numerous people for at least four years. It was "fixed" twice, IIRC, but the next upgrade broke it again.

Then file a bug. Otherwise it won't get attention.

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Your first response, describing the build process, is the right answer.

A bug report doesn't seem useful .. this has been fixed, it just doesn't stay fixed. Frankly, for this to continue to get past the developer(s) makes me wonder if they actually use the program ...

No, I'll try a personal build and if it doesn't work out, I'll just break down and buy something.

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