inbuilt PGP system

[oftengrey]

Right now, the android app requires OpenKeyChain to manage and use PGP keys to open/send encrypted mails. This makes Thunderbird dependent on another third-party app that might stop development anytime.

It would be better to implement the PGP system into Thunderbird Android like its on PC. This will also streamline the process and make it easier to handle encrypted emails.

[Jon]

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[ankokudaishogun]

OpenKeyChain has, in fact, ALREADY stopped development

Alas, this is a larger issue on Android as OpenKeyChain was pretty much the only GPG provider.

And I've never been much of a fan for each application managing their own GPG keyring.

[vanitasvitae]

Hey!

Developer of PGPainless here. In my humble opinion, the best way forward would be to eventually switch the OpenPGP backend over to a SOP (Stateless OpenPGP Protocol) implementation.
Doing so would avoid vendor lockin to a specific OpenPGP implementation, as it would be relatively easy to switch out the implementation for a different one.

While SOP defines a command line interface, there are also some language-specific API definitions. For Java/Kotlin I created sop-java, for which there is an implementation using PGPainless (pgpainless-sop), as well as a (very early) experimental implementation with vanilla Bouncy Castle (bc-sop).

The bc-sop implementation even has support for OpenPGP v6, which will be coming soon-ish to PGPainless as well 🙂