Because unlocking your phone with a password is considerably more time-consuming than unlocking it with a passcode. Today, most people find using a passcode too slow, and would never want to revert to that. So I can’t even imagine anyone using a password instead, even though it’s more secure because it’s typically longer than a passcode which is just numbers, and you can use a variety of characters, letters, numbers, and special characters.
I think this is an important point. Even if we do not think that Proton is trying to grow their consumer base, it can still be their primary targeted audience, which I discuss below.
I think you may be attributing malice needlessly to Proton. If their consumer base knew what Bitwarden Authenticator or Aegis were already, then there would be no need to market to them. It could be that the targeted audience here is not people within the privacy community who are already aware of the many alternatives, but rather the many people who use privacy-invasive products/services from big tech such as Microsoft or Google.
To the average internet user, Proton Authenticator would be entering the field as a competitor of MS Auth and Authy and Google Auth. However, to people within the privacy community, we know that Proton Authenticator’s actual competitors are that of Aegis and Bitwarden and the likes. If it is true that Proton’s targeted audience is outside the privacy community (which I think is the case), then I see no intentional malice being done.
Competition is not a word that can make sense by itself in this context. Businesses compete for customers. If Proton promotes their new Authenticator app as being a competitor of MS Auth and the likes, then their targeted audience is IMO clearly big/privacy-invasive tech customers.
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This is a silly thing to be mad about. No company has their marketing team mention other available alternatives when they promote a new product, unless its to throw shade like they did at Microsoft.