Bitching About Proton For The Last Time On This Blog

I know I said I would post an update in a few weeks down the line, but I can’t keep using that shit for longer. I’m sorry, why does anyone put up with Proton Mail as it is? If all you need is a secondary mailbox for more sensitive stuff, sure, it works fine. But as your main?

Their mobile apps are atrocious. The iPhone app can display when a message is self-destructing but can’t set a message to self-destruct. The email editor is so glitchy and looks weird. The font rendering? Bitch, how did they fuck it up so badly. And don’t even get me started on their “iPad” app which actually doesn’t exist. I tried using their web app instead, but you can’t set that as the default mail client. Notifications don’t really work there either.

The Mac app is a joke. It’s a web wrapper and has the same glitches as the web app. When you move the email editor to the side, it selects everything on the page. Excuse me? So I decided to use their (proprietary and seemingly unmaintained) Proton Bridge with Apple Mail. But you can’t snooze emails there and you can’t view them either. At the prices they charge, I would expect a bit more than whatever the fuck their offerings are. Proton VPN is nice, but for that price? Nah, I’m sticking with Mullvad. I hate having to buy into a whole suite just to get a decent price.

Their only semi-decent app is Proton Pass and that’s only on iOS. It’s also their only iPad-optimized app. Here is a list of all the issues I had with Proton Pass alone:

• The notification bubble on their extension can’t be hidden; especially annoying on Safari where it’s red and the extension icon is in their own branding, standing out from the rest of my extensions
• Saving passkeys doesn’t work with their extension despite enabling the option in the extension’s settings. The same thing worked fine on my phone.
• Signing into the extension with biometrics is not working even when Proton Pass is installed
• No option to disable the tray icon for their (Electron) app
• Proton Pass doesn’t integrate with native autofill on macOS, despite their confusing phrasing here that implies at least native autofill works (it doesn’t show up in System Settings).

The SimpleLogin integration is nice, but that’s about it. It’s not like they made SimpleLogin themselves; they just bought it. So I won’t be giving them credit for that.

I talked about my (political) issues with Proton – the company – in my last and those have only intensified my dissatisfaction with their technical shortcomings. Buying their Proton Unlimited subscription felt like buying a product that didn’t exist yet. It felt like buying into – non-binding – promises with no timeline. So I refunded it.

Good thing they now use Apple’s in-app purchases so I didn’t have to mess with their shitty customer service. Rant off.