News4C on the Blue Mail 1.9.4.6 update
Chromebook printing, a round of bug fixes, and a release that says more about the update cadence than about any single feature.
1 min read
News4C covered the release of Blue Mail 1.9.4.6 for Android, and the headline feature is a small one that matters to a specific group of people.
What shipped
Printing from Chromebooks. Blue Mail users on ChromeOS can print an email directly from the app. Narrow, but if you are a student or work somewhere that runs Chromebooks, printing an email had previously meant forwarding it to yourself and opening it somewhere else.
Bug fixes, including stability work aimed at eliminating occasional crashes.
The numbers
The update weighed in at 43.17MB. It targets Android 7.1 Nougat, while keeping a minimum requirement of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, which in 2018 still covers a long tail of older devices.
That minimum is the detail worth noting. Supporting a six-year-old operating system release is a deliberate cost, and most applications had already dropped it. For an email client it is a defensible choice, because the people least able to replace a phone are not the people least in need of email.
The part that is actually the story
A single point release adding printing is not remarkable on its own. The cadence behind it is.
Blue Mail ships small, frequent updates rather than large infrequent ones, and as News4C put it, the developers know how important email is to people, which leaves them little room for errors. A mail client is infrastructure. The correct release strategy for infrastructure is a steady stream of small changes that can each be reasoned about, not an annual rewrite.
