Just a bit of an annoyance but it just is.
On my fairphone 3 I can’t seem to get the mail app work with my hotmail/outlook account (and from posts I am not the only one) and also the app lounge is finicky and gives me the ‘can’t create account’ more often than not (I am not the only one also with this).
But this while the apps these were forked from, K-9 mail and Aurora Store, almost never fail me.
I just wanted to share that it is annoying that I have to have a backup app for the default apps.
The mail app should work well. A precondition is that you configured proper POP3 or IMAP and SMTP servers. Have you? Exchange will not work.
Other pitfalls are the transmission and encryption of the password and the security layers (SSL, TLS) to be used. Note: POP3, IMAP and SMTP are in many cases indeed different servers, they can differ in the settings.
A good approach is to have a PC mail client working with the same servers and to bring then exactly the same settings into the Mail app on the mobile device. The PC mail client can then also be used to test receiving and sending from the mobile device.
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I wanted to concur that forking apps to do minimal changes that are hit or miss, but sometimes break things is probably a waste of time for e/OS/ devs.
Example from my side: me and my dad experience issues with the camera resetting photo resolution to some arbitrary default after every app reset. I installed OpenCamera, which seems ot be exactly the same software, but it without the issue. I also dont use stock gallery (replaced with fossil gallery - many more options and usability), started using Aurora instead of AppLounge, as AL had a lot of downtime.
What is the point of making these forks? It kinda obscures accountability - if 99% of the work on mail program is done by k-9/thunderbird why pretend it is an e/OS software - let it be branded by what it is - it will free up devs time, direct some complaining towards upstream communities, it would be transparent in terms of what e/OS is and isnt doing (some people might believe e.foundation develop all the apps in-house) and would showcase the strengths and resilience of the open-source ecosystem.
The problem of these forks has already been a topic here several times, especially related to their aging and also the questionable responsibility in case of a bug. The most discussed item was the Browser because the source of the fork (Bromite) died while it’s fork was still delivered with /e/. Also the deletion of these forked default apps by the user has been a topic many times. This comes up from time to time but the developers have their own opinions.
What you can easily do is
- install what you want to use
- hide these default apps from your launcher so that they don’t disturb.
To have development control about the default Apps you ship with your OS.
Upstream anything can happen, while in your fork … not (at least hopefully so)
You can’t win either way.
You adopt upstream unchanged … upstream will accidentally sabotage you in some form at some point, users are unhappy and ask why you don’t have crucial default stuff under better control.
You use forks … you have development/deployment lag compared to upstream and possibly on top you implement diverging design/feature decisions for better (in your point of view) or worse, users are unhappy and ask why you don’t use upstream.
I too think the forking is a great debt, especially when it’s only theming - but there are pro sides to forking and consolidating auth across Apps that wouldn’t collaborate that easily. The primary use case is their murena nextcloud though.
what version are you on? murena made an effort to make this work lately, as in: register their own oauth client id
Upstream anything can happen, while in your fork … not
If anything goes wrong upstream, then fork it - that is the wonderful feature of open source. But how often does it go wrong. Is it really often enough to maintain all these forks just in case.
I expect the main reason was to make it easy to use and avoid confusing unsophisticated users with potentially cryptic names (k-9 or thunderbird might mean nothing to my grandma) - but it feels like there is some other way - add a descriptor to the name, use a launcher with categories, use some symlinks/aliases etc etc…
Sophisticated users can easily build their own Lineage with the apps they require.
Maybe “average sophisticated” users appreciate what is going on.
So I had another app for which the login is managed through the default browser. The default browser I see is the one that comes with e/OS (called browser). I downloaded the duckduckgo browser and set it as the default browser and login just worked fine. So this yet another example of where the forking gives trouble and I have to install the original app to get things working.
@irrlicht This reminded me of the mail app where for hotmail access the login also uses the browser (where I have to login on MS live - your suggestion of transferring the settings one by one is no longer valid - all happens through OAuth 2.0) and sure enough with the default browser the standard mail app with e/OS works again … So I could delete the K-9 mail app but I had to add the Duckduckgo browser …
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