Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

I've been no waiting for this for so long! I have been using K9, and I love using a FOSS email client, but having native Fastmail support is just so much better.

The native AOSP email app, for example, doesn't even allow you to choose which email address to send from when replying (that, or it's so hidden that I was unable to find it.) Unfortunately, like most AOSP apps, it's been effectively deprecated in favor of the Google alternative (Gmail) so it's unlikely to get any better anytime soon.

I'm also so glad to see that they are releasing on both platforms simultaneously. Having used both an iPhone and an Android, I find it very frustrating when a product is released on one but not the other[0]

[0] Yes, I understand why startups choose to do this. We had to decide which platform to support first at my startup, so I understand the tradeoff involved. But as a user, it's still frustrating.

It was actually a really interesting development process. We already had the web app, and our main UI developer is an Apple guy, so he took on the iOS version. Meanwhile I'm primarily a Linux guy and work on FastMail's backend services, but also an Android user, so I did the Android version.

What it meant is that the other guy could make supporting UI tweaks as he needed, and I could make supporting backend tweaks as needed (eg push system integration), but we had to come together a lot to find the similarities and differences between the two platforms and do changes for each other.

It became a bit of a competition and we both were working very fast. We had something we could use every day in less than a month and we each learned a huge amount about the other person's area of speciality.

I'm fairly confident if we did just one app first we would have gone much slower and made some bad architectural decisions that would have hurt when we got onto the next platform. If we ever do a third platform client it'll be really easy.

Fastmail is part of the open web. So why a proprietary client, instead of joining in with K9?

It's basically our existing web client, but hooked in to Google's notification service.

What we are hoping to do (quite soon) is switch to pure JMAP for the app's communication to the server - http://jmap.io/

At that point, k9 will be able to get the same great push notification system and efficient updates by implementing a JMAP backend.

Thanks for your work on the android app. I've just tried it and it seems great so far.

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