However, we’ve also heard numerous times that people love K-9 Mail and wished the app would stay around. That’s why we’ve announced in December to do just that. We’ve started work on this and are now able to build two apps from the same source code. Thunderbird for Android already includes the fancy new Thunderbird logo and a first version of a blue theme.

Does this seem daft to anyone else?

I assume the same codebase will generate the app branded as either k9-mail or thunderbird? What is the point of that?