I have a feeling that Proton has too many different products, and inevitably, like their greatest competitor, the google, they will be forced to wind some of them down. And that will make some users mad. Proton Drive still does not have an option to sync files from Linux with no ETA. Introducing new products and not caring about existing products sure shows company's nearsightedness. And even if I am paying customer, they are still pestering me with upsell promotions, to use their other products that I have no interest in.
Completely agree. I'm a longstanding paying customer and general supporter of Proton and it has been very clear for a long time that their attention is being spread too thin.
The more recently launched products are not really feature complete in many ways and some go months without updates.
Email is great, I'd still highly recommend it. But I wish they would restrict their WIP and focus on fewer things (for their own sake).
Edit: to balance out my negativity a bit - I REALLY recommend Proton for email, to home users and business users alike. It's rock solid and the iOS app is extremely good too. It's also very clear to me that the Proton team work extremely hard, and listen to feedback. But my concerns about a perceived lack of focus still stand!
Hi there, Proton is backed by subscribers rather than VC investors, advertisers and selling data to third-parties. Both SimpleLogin and Standard Notes are open source community-driven projects, and for more on what makes Proton different, see: https://proton.me/blog/sustaining-mission-over-time
Is this a automated bot response? The main critique of the parent comment isn't that Proton engaging in many project, because of investors/ad revenue, but the act of doing so.
I'm a active Protonmail subscriber too, who downgraded to the mail business plan, because I too want Proton to focus on their core business and not engage in becoming a clone of Microsoft 365.
There used to be a regular vote on what users are mainly interested in. Maybe I missed it, but I too think that the risk of engaging in too many ventures will be the ultimate downfall. One last argument is, that hosting files and text and whatever is planned in the future weakens the legal ground to protect user privacy, as the (legal and technical) attack surface of hosting services is greater than just end-to-end encrypted email.
Looking at other responses posted by that account, I think they might be a bot or just pasting AI-generated responses.
That said, I think privacy oriented people are desperate for exactly what you said you don’t want - a Microsoft 365 equivalent that is privacy oriented. I’d be willing to pay for it personally, and don’t think it automatically follows that launching a new product makes existing ones worse. Maybe they’ll get a lot more users that purchase the overall bundle and help them fund all these ventures better than ever before.
No, we don't use bots to respond to questions here. Automated messages from us (which we sometimes use in our support ticketing system) are always marked as such.
Hi there, the above is not an AI response. We were just sharing that creating privacy focused tools without the backing of big tech takes time and effort. We have a lot planned for 2024 to round out our suite of privacy products, and we're excited for what we can accomplish with the support of the community.
You can also check out our feature request platform and change the category to planned or completed to see recent activity https://protonmail.uservoice.com
Just a tip, here on HN we like talking to _people_ in the comments. Founders and senior managers, for preference. But anyone willing to give their name and role in the company will often do.
Your comments so far read as detached and impersonal, especially with the more than conspicuous usage of plural pronouns.
> Proton is backed by subscribers rather than VC investors,
So I really hope you listen to us, the subscribers, and try to keep focus on improving the products that you have already launched and that we are paying for, before getting distracted on other projects.
Honestly the basic features that are still missing from Calendar are becoming a bit embarrassing. It's also embarrassing for me with my business clients when my calendar system is the only one that doesn't seem to function like a normal calendar does - and they see that too.
You've done an amazing job with product development so far - especially Email - but please don't squander that. Some of your products really really need basic missing features and bugs sorted - and quickly, because you've already sold them to customers. I get the sense that your customers are unusually loyal (which is to your credit) but goodwill won't last forever.
Thank you for your feedback. We're working on improving the Proton Calendar offer, currently making sure that our iOS app is on par with its Android equivalent (we've recently made it possible to add participants directly from the app, as well as some additional convenience features). Once this is finished, we'll look into other planned improvements for Proton Calendar.
Fine - please fix email threads in the android email app. I feel what OP is saying when a basic feature expected of any email client is still absent. I say this as a multi-year, mostly satisfied customer.
I'm not sure why you think this just because they don't support Linux yet. They have a few core key products such as Mail, Calendar, Drive, VPN and Pass. All of these are great for a Google Workspace convert. Adding Notes to that makes perfect sense as I want my Notes secured end to end and as a Voyager subscriber I'm really happy they are going down this path and it seems right in their wheelhouse.
To address your Proton Drive comment directly, they are a small team and they are rolling out Web, iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. The most common platforms today which is what they should focus on. Android already has photo backup, iOS it's in beta. They are continually having new releases for all of these products and you can see that on /r/ProtonDrive. Saying they have abandoned these products or don't care about them is hyperbole. Is it taking longer than I would like, sure, do I want them to release a Public API for Drive (for rclone) and a Linux client, absolutely but lets give teams the benefit of the doubt.
>I'm not sure why you think this just because they don't support Linux yet
He doesn't think it just because of that, this is just an example. That they had spread too thin with different products is a fact.
I got interested in them for mail, and I could undertand them having a few more things, but the constant expansion worries me too. Even worse if they amass a portfolio just to look nice to get sold and folded into some monstrocity like Google.
>They have a few core key products such as Mail, Calendar, Drive, VPN and Pass
Even those, do these sound as "few core key products"? Those are already a lot for a company like that (as you said, " they are a small team"). Especially when they keep adding other stuff too, like Notes now.
You have no idea, it is your opinion and employee counts don't mean anything there as you don't know what their org looks like or what their productivity looks like. You keep stating things as fact without any real knowledge. You have no real evidence to back up your claim of "fact" and I don't wish to argue with you. I hope you progress and learn how arrogant you are here with your claim of fact and change your attitude in the future and to give people the benefit of the doubt. Best of luck to you.
> To address your Proton Drive comment directly, they are a small team and they are rolling out Web, iOS, Android, Windows and Mac.
You said it was a small team for Proton Drive.
I also feel they are prioritizing more products instead of investing in improving their current offering
* iOS has had some issues, I actually had to remove myself from the TestFlight due to a bug but it is actively being worked on (the beta version). I'm assuming they are waiting on the iOS beta to be stable before another release but I'm not part of the team.
* Proton Drive for Mac was last updated March 29th.
Just because a team is having an issue with one piece of their software doesn't mean it's abandoned or unsupported. Again, there is a lot of hyperbole here.
So, "Linux Client" for Proton Drive is 2nd most voted request. I need to log in to vote. Guess what are two top options to login... Facebook and Google. This is really sad.
I don’t really understand the point of your comment. Uservoice is a 3rd party SaaS. You can use email/password login there. What do you expect and why it is sad?
I think notes are something their privacy oriented customers have been asking for. It’s not just an arbitrary thing. Personally I would like more such products from them, like an end to end encrypted office suite.
Joplin is amazing, supports arbitrary file attachments of any size, optionally encrypts every thing. Has an iOS, Andriod, Linux, Mac, and Windows app. "Just works".
Did you know that Fastmail's IMAP supports notes? You can even use it for Apple Notes backend instead of iCloud. It's a shame that Apple Notes is so awful as a simple notes apps.
I’m a happy FastMail and Joplin user too but don’t know too much about WebDAV protocol. Is syncing fast enough to manage your notes synced between devices ? I’m syncing Joplin (and keepass) with Dropbox but would love getting rid of it and syncthing haven’t proved to be fast enough for such sensitive files (it is for cold files). What do you think ?
I emailed both Fastmail and Proton with the same question before giving them money.
For Proton, I sent the following message:
Hello I am looking to move my self hosted email to a managed provider but I currently have 12 vanity domains.
Even your most expensive plan doesn't allow for that many domains. Is there a way to get approved for more domains? I would like to do the Proton Unlimited plan and would be willing to prepay for two years of service.
For Fastmail is was similar but adjusted to account for their plans.
Proton took 7 days to respond, then, the response I got was just a hand-off to a different team. I never did get an actual answer.
Fastmail on the other hand responded in less than a day, and, had a trial period that let me verify everything I wanted would work.
Fastmail has been about the same for me with speed of response. I don't have to reach out to them often, but when I do it's always quick.
They also don't have a limit on domains. I haven't seen any price gated functionality or any limits. I don't have 12 domains, but I do have a handful and it all works quite seamlessly.
I have been with Fastmail for probably a decade or more now. Worth it.
Probably mostly there to prevent rampant abuse from spammers, scammers, or people just doing really weird shit creating millions of $thing where everyone else has a few dozen or hundred.
Not OP but personnaly I preferred the traditional approach of FastMail who has been in business for long time and are doing only mail while Proton seems too gimmicky to me. Coming from VPN business (and having proved not being that reliable) didn’t help. I just don’t believe their marketing, especially the CERN confusion.
Firstly, yes, Proton started as an email service in 2014, and Proton VPN was added to the offer in 2017.
The case shared above in fact shows that Proton's encryption provides privacy by default - none of the user's emails could be shared with law enforcement despite the data request which we had no legal grounds to contest.
Of course, as any other legally operating company, we have to comply with the local law enforcement. The privacy we provide is reflected in not having access to the data to share with law enforcement, not in refusing to comply (which is not possible for anyone operating legally).
I end up with them because I found it less complicated to set up my email workflow. I also liked the ability, even if not officially supported, to have my tasks/notes/events/contacts synced via there web and card dav server.
I like the webmail more. ProtonMail is slow and doesn't support text view. Also ProtonMail didn't exist yet, and back then FastMail was one of the few options for hosted non-crap email.
I use fastmail because at the time it had calendar and contacts, and proton at the time didn’t. Otherwise I’d use proton for the extra privacy (Eg, company isn’t in Australia)
Will Standard Notes 'productivity' and/or 'professional' features (as listed on https://standardnotes.com/plans) be available for free to all paying Proton subscribers?
Most importantly: when will paying Proton users be able to start using the productivity/professional features via their Proton subscription? I can't wait, which is why I'm eager to know. :-)
I've waited for Proton to release a feature like this. Finally... I mean, I love Obsidian but it's not encrypted on my devices by default.
Could you just sync your markdown files with Proton Drive and point Obsidian there?
I left Standard Notes mainly because I wanted to use markdown files wherever/whenever I wanted versus being locked into something difficult to move from. Was good otherwise.
This is great news, I’d love to see it included in paid subscriptions. I think Proton does the right thing building fully functional alternative to Google/Microsoft/Apple apps.
People like me don’t want to spread the butter over a dozen of different vendors, but at the same time paying for this type of service to a hardware or advertising firm doesn’t make sense. Neither I want my data to be managed by US-based company, so it’s quite a natural choice. That said, I hope Proton will find the right balance between cost of subscription and investment in R&D. Sometimes it feels like they are not moving fast enough - as much as I’d love to start using Calendar or Drive, they are just not usable yet.
Thank you for your feedback! Please make sure to vote for your favorite feature requests for Proton Drive and Proton Calendar here: https://protonmail.uservoice.com/, so we can make them as useful to you as we can.
Interesting - I've used Standard Notes since 2019 and, more recently, become a Proton user. Both products have a similar, well designed, feel and make encryption easier to daily drive. SN in particular is just a really well-designed notes app.
After being burned by acquisitions in the past, I sincerely hope we see both products improve each other.
We have the same timeline and general opinion — BUT SN has shown several serious bugs over the years … one of which locked me out of my account at a very inconvenient time, and support was responsive but ultimately could not help. Another thing I’ve seen is a password-protected file will display its contents for 1 or 2 seconds before being obscured and asking for a password. These have given me pause as to the robustness of the security of SN. Hopefully Proton can put some attention to these issues.
Hi! Can you email Standard Notes again at help@standardnotes.com for the latter issue about a password-protected file remaining open for a few seconds?
Hopefully they can turn Standard Notes into a product I’d be willing to return to. I like the company ethos, but the product was too clunky. The configurable editors all seemed to be of a poorer quality than opinionated competitors.
Yeah, a lot of the editors were just open source editing widgets dropped in, often without a serious effort to make sure the interface or rendered documents matched the rest of the application. I'd love an editor on par with what Obsidian has, but all the editors were so clunky that I stuck to plain text for almost my entire vault.
The floating "close keyboard" button creates situations on iOS that make it impossible to select particular bits of text sometimes. It makes me strongly suspect they aren't seriously dogfooding their own application.
The close button was implemented to provide a way of dismissing the keyboard for plain text notes on iOS. Unfortunately, it does obscure a portion of the note. We'll be looking into improving this behavior in the future.
I wish they would rather fix their Proton Calendar app. It is really useless to have notifications coming on email as "Reminder: event starting at 6:00 PM". You know when it starts. There is a link to an event. Why also not put there title of the event?
Thanks for the feedback! We released a new feature on iOS: a new calendar invite widget now shows the main event info in all emails that contain event invites. Tapping on it takes you to the Proton Calendar app directly from your inbox.
My guess is some kind of security/privacy angle to not leak that information (maybe to Apple, who sees the contents of push notifications?). I don’t know - just speculating.
Hi! Note that it's not hidden, Proton Mail Plus is listed quite clearly on our Pricing page, along with Free, Unlimited and Family plans: https://proton.me/mail/pricing
I was a paying user to both Standard Notes and Proton. I, however, moved away from Standard Notes and my subscription renewed without notice. I contacted them and they reversed the transaction without hassle. I continue to pay for Proton. Depending on how the products are incorporated I can see myself moving back to Standard Notes.
Diversifying a lot. Next acquisition will be Ghost(https://ghost.org/) I bet. Similar DNA, fits in the portfolio (If they are trying to match the feature set of Google) and have no VC backing.
Wouldn’t that be interesting. Snatch up a privacy friendly analytics company and some forum plugins while they’re at it to help people more easily create non-creepy online communities using their tech The all in one solution for being a good digital citizen?
The world where everyone can easily have their own webpage without it being a Facebook or LinkedIn page
Since proton is watching this thread...one more person saying to you proton, please stay focused on your core product. A secure mostly non-spying..., ad free, email client.
However... I am happy that you're adding a note feature.
The case shared above in fact shows that Proton's encryption provides privacy by default - none of the user's emails could be shared with law enforcement despite the data request which we had no legal grounds to contest. Of course, as any other legally operating company, we have to comply with the local law enforcement. The privacy we provide is reflected in not having access to the data to share with law enforcement, not in refusing to comply (which is not possible for anyone operating legally).
We also don't have access to your encryption keys - they are encrypted with your account password, which we don't have access to, and have no way to acquire.
Maybe I am in the minority, but I've been a Proton user since 2016 and a paying customer since 2017 and I'm excited about this acquisition. I use AnyType for note taking, but Standard Notes is a solid alternative and I am excited to see an expanded ecosystem. Makes me very happy to keep keep paying for my $18/month Visionary plan.
It's a hard problem because people want similarly privacy respecting solutions to all their other needs as well. I also don't love a single company handling all the important bits. It doesn't matter if it's Apple or Google or Proton. That's why I don't use most of their suite and prefer FLOSS whenever possible. This is not possible for email (yes I've tried to self host, it sucks ass and emails get dropped).
I don’t see how a separate notes product expands the attack surface of the email product. At best it might use up some of their engineering team’s attention. But the email product may also just be "complete" (mostly about maintenance). So perhaps they can work on other things without sacrificing its quality?
From that perspective, we would prefer to focus efforts on securing the Proton account as much as possible. There are two actions the user can already take.
First, enabling 2FA will take the risk of compromise down to almost zero (our data on compromised accounts supports this also).
Hi there, this is not an AI generated response. We are replying to the comment on attack surfaces, and how our focus is on securing a single Proton account by enabling 2FA and Proton Sentinel rather having to manage security for multiple accounts.
Please speak to your superiors and let them know that this corporate style rings poorly on hackernews. See if they can at least let you speak more personally, less press release. It may go a long way towards improving perceptions here. Or at least credibility.
I'll cut the corporate account some slack; the parent commenter's criticism is sarcastic and a straw man.
I got the point of the proton account politely saying "we secure the account holistically and having an additional product is not an expansion of attack surface".