I don’t believe we’ll see a Proton phone either. I think they should focus on what they have before moving on
Web browser, an alternative to Signal, Proton Phone: “It’s all inevitable” – Interview with Andy Yen
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Basically, what Proton is doing right now is undermining the fundamental concept of privacy and weakening the posture they originally had. They seem to want to have a product in every possible area, while leaving their older products half-baked.
There is no point in reinventing the wheel by releasing their own messenger, browser, and phone when there are already very good options out there. This centralized structure also creates a single point of failure and violates the Unix philosophy: “Make each program do one thing well.”
Of course, someone may argue that this makes it easier to switch from Google to Proton. But they could achieve similar results without building their own half-baked clones, for example by creating partnerships like Tuta and Nextcloud did.
It’s obvious that Proton Chat won’t beat Signal, and Proton Browser will never be as private as Tor Browser. So what is the point of creating more diversity in the community if they could just ship one or two genuinely good products? If they want privacy infrastructure to grow, they should support or partner with already existing, well-made services instead of trying to undermine them.
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I do think Proton’s biggest problem is its history of leaving products half finished or missing critical features that should have been there from the beginning.
To be fair, there are also people who want incredibly niche, highly specific features tailored to their personal needs and then conflate those with basic, essential functionality. I don’t think those are remotely the same thing. Like me, I desperately want more folder colors. But with that said, Proton does have a history of leaving products feeling unfinished of what should be standard features.
Where I disagree is with the idea that Proton shouldn’t be developing other products or services. I have no problem with them expanding into other areas. I don’t know how they allocate their resources, which teams work on which products, or whether developing something new actually takes resources away from existing services.
I have no problem with anyone entering a market just because established alternatives already exist. Competition can lead to better products and give us more choices. Something else it can do is potentially light a fire under existing developers to step up their game.
LibreOffice came after OpenOffice. Nextcloud followed ownCloud. Even Brave is working on a UI overhaul due to Zen.
I don’t think there is any promise that Proton will make something better, but I don’t think that’s an argument against trying.
I’m in favor of more competition and more independence. People aren’t avoiding Signal because Proton might make a competitor. They’re avoiding Signal because their entire social circle is still on WhatsApp.
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I don’t think Proton being a larger ecosystem would drive other FOSS products out of business.
First, they might target a different userbase (les techie people, and more B2B).
Second, Proton getting more users would also probably benefit the other FOSS projects, by increseasing the attention to privacy, and by giving them people disappointed by the Proton ecosystem, or that want to go “even further”.
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I have been using their products for quite some time and they work better than other private and secure alternatives. So can’t really relate.
After reading all of the posts here, it almost looks like a competitor sent a bot farm to hate on Proton.
Like what the hell is going on?
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There are no bots; we look at things in the long term, not the short term.
In the long term, it’s easy to predict that Proton’s goal is to kill off the competition from open-source and free software.
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In that case, shouldn’t the open-source and free software have died out ages ago?
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So the Proton fundraiser which gave money to for example Ladybird or GrapheneOS was also part of that plan?
I don’t know how it makes sense to give a rather large amount of money to a project that you want to get rid off.
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I find the bot theory to be more likely than this. Which I do think he was clearly being hyperbolic to make a greater point, but, come on, man. Proton isn’t the final boss of open source software. I think we can criticize Proton without giving them a comic book villain origin story.
I just think there’s a difference between questioning a company’s direction and assigning malicious intent to everything it does. I don’t want toxic positivity in my discussions, but I don’t need doom scrolling either. We should be able to have those conversations without treating the most cynical interpretation as the most likely outcome.
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I disagree. Proton is a good service, but they occasionally make the wrong decisions, sometimes more often than they should. Anyway, have you ever seen a perfect company? Everything has its ups and downs. I just hope Proton’s next decisions are better, but they should definitely listen more to their community.
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Mailbox .org also offers mail with calendar and contacts, office, drive, notes, chat (xmpp), video conference (was jitsi, now they are developing they own opentalk), polls and as their user, I would say it’s hard to recommend it as a small(er) business privacy-oriented alternative to Google or Microsoft.