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Comment by detritus | Hacker News Reader

Ha, so it's better than Fastmail's own Android client? I may well give it a go, then, as the Fastmail app (much as I love their service) is 'not great'.

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I use K9 because Fastmail's client is closed source and not on f-droid (I don't have a google play account). It works ok for me as a secondary/occasional email client (main one is on laptop). It does miss notifications. I have heard somewhere that the only way to get reliable notifications involved using a google play service, which I didn't want to allow. I usually have mobile data on my phone disabled anyway, unless I am actually about to use it. But, I think other people use their phones a lot more than I do. I'm in front of a real computer almost all the time, so the phone is just in case I have to check something while away.

I think you can set it up to get pull notifications (like every 15 or 30 min), and then disable "battery optimisation" for the app (that is, set it to "no restriction"). In my experience (my wife's GrapheneOS phone) it doesn't drain that much battery anyway.

I like Fastmail's app but I have different Fastmail for work and home. I don't want to connect them and I don't want to switch between them in one app. For now I have Fastmail for work and I use Apple Mail for home, but in the past I have used K9 Mail for this sort of situation.

I wonder why it's not permitted to have multiple instances of an application with different configurations.

It is possible, with a work profile, (though I'm not sure how one sets up their own profile without a corp-managed device): https://support.google.com/work/android/answer/6191949?hl=en

An app like Shelter: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.typeblog.shelter/

It's an alternative to Island, except it doesn't have analytics (Insular is a fork of Island w/o that, but Shelter is a newer and better app imo)

I don't use Android anymore but I used to do this with Shelter : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.typeblog.s...

I really like their Android and web clients. I don't use a lot of advanced features, but find it to be very responsive and handles everything I do very well. Prior to switching to Fastmail, I used to have my mail forwarded to Gmail but much prefer Fastmail's clients to Gmail now, which surprised me.

Same for me

> Ha, so it's better than Fastmail's own Android client?

(This a biased personal opinion not based on a real experience)

Judging from thr screenshots it is the same framework used by many Android apps (most notably for me by Nextcloud) and it is really sucks.

The current FastMail app is sadly dependent on gapps (AFAIR FireBase dependency) but othereise it is just an SPA in the guise of an Android app which works marvelous... till you have the connectivity.

If you need an offline access to your mail then the FastMail app isn't for you.

Hm I don't understand your point here. I do not know their Android app either but looked up the screenshots and this seems to be pretty similar to their iOS app, which is basically a small, highly functional and incredibly fast version of their website (which means you get all the features like creating aliases as well). Sadly, this means there is pretty much no offline capability. At least until now, but I know they're working on that.

It's exactly that.

Fastmail "app" is just a webpage.

Fastmail has a native Android app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fastmail.a...

... that is just a webview.

Really curious in what world that can be considered native.

Oh I thought you were saying they only had a web app, and you didn't realize they had an actual app.

I use the Fastmail Android app and didn't realize it's just a webview.

Which is basically just a webview. Don't get me wrong - it's a good webview. But as a consequence there's no offline functionality at all - not even to view emails you've just opened a minute ago. Otherwise I think the Fastmail product is great.

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