Thoughts on the Proton app suite on Apple products?
I am curious to see what other peoples experience has been with all of their apps?
I made the decision to switch to proton for mail, drive, calendar and vpn 7 months ago. I wanted to get away from having all my stuff tied to apple/google/microsoft. While it has been pretty solid for the most part, especially with android. The same cannot be said for their iOS/iPadOS apps at all. This will be my personal observation from my experience with iOS/iPadOS apps.
Mail - Pretty solid all around experience, timely notifications on incoming mail. I have 4 email addresses setup based on the type of account I used for them. I only get bothered by the emails that I would need to see and the rest get checked around once a day. Recently the whole app on both iPad and iPhone has just slowed down so much. Opening the app is frustratingly slow, while everything loads in. I will get a new email and click on the notification and the app will sometimes load the last email I viewed and not the one from the notification. I have cleared the cache and signed out and then back in and it still has this behavior.
Drive - This one is the biggest pain point for me. On iPhone the app crashes when you try to watch a video in landscape mode. This is a pretty basic feature in 2023 if you ask me. I did report the bug, to which they said they are aware and have no timeline for when it will be fixed. The next biggest issue with drive on iOS/iPadOS is that you can only upload 1 file at a time. If you do multiple files if not all, almost all of them will fail to upload. You have to do it 1 file at a time. Reported this and was told the same thing I was about the landscape mode. Seems odd to not want to fix a core function of a cloud storage app as soon as possible.
VPN - I really enjoy this vpn and have paid for just the vpn in past. Now it constantly disconnects or gets stuck in connecting. I can’t use quick connect unless I manually pick a country connect then disconnect. After that I can use quick connect with out any issues. This happens without having secure core toggle on. This is happening on both my iPad and iPhone. Waiting on them to actually help trouble shoot this after sending them a bug report.
Calendar - Is the most useless app they have every put out. I was so excited to finally dial this calendar app in when I got my iPad. Only to find out that they don’t have an iPad version of their calendar. Which makes no sense because that is an app that can really shine on an iPad when do well. This whole app just feels like an after thought and they only have it just to say we have a calendar app too.
I feel that compared to when I started using all of their apps back in December. The quality and stability of the apps has really taken a hit. I understand that they probably have a focus on building their brand with an app suite based on privacy. I feel like the quality is really taking a hit especially with iOS/iPadOS versions of the apps. The obvious answer is to just switch back to android and save myself the headache of apple. The reason for apple is a whole post in its own and I want to keep this one on topic.
For clarification, I have been using the iOS versions since December. I was switching between pixel 7 pro and 14 pro max every few weeks. Having an eco system of apps not based on either platform was also why I chose proton everything.
The biggest problem for me was that Proton can’t sync contacts to iOS. I basically figured if I need to keep my Google account for Contacts then I might as well keep using Drive there too. Not a huge fan of splitting those services up.
Not sure if that has changed recently ?
I did a little searching on that. It seems likes that function is on the road map, but who knows when that will happen. You can currently sync your phone contacts to proton but proton to phone isn’t possible. Then again they have had contact management for 6 years and still can’t sync with devices. Their road map for features is all over the place it seams.
This is going to be petty in the scheme of things but I exclusively use my calendars in month view with the schedule visable per day in the cells, it's how I can do any sort of mid-term planning which is important to me. I was in the process of changing over but stopped when I found out there wasn't a month view. Sent them an email to have the feature added, would love to switch but not until they have this done
Do you need to use their apps? I was considering moving to Proton, but only if that’s possible with the iOS Mail and Calendar apps. I can’t imagine they don’t have IMAP and WebDAV. I should take a look myself…
Edit: so, I didn’t really do my homework… at all. So the main selling point of Proton is security, security that can’t be achieved with those protocols alone. That’s the reason you need dedicated apps. Too bad, that is a no go for me.
I switched to Tutanota for mail a while back, mostly just to the growing instability of Proton, and all their other services can easily be replaced by some other cheap VPN, a hard drive, and an actual paper calendar (maybe £70 total there)