Sorry guys, I guess this is just a rant/venting post.

I’ve been a long proton user, for almost 8 years now. And still. Still can’t use it as my main app. Especially for phone use. And the more I’m trying to get away from Google, the more painfully clear this is becoming. And the main reasons for this are stupid.

There’s long standing requests for the app to actually work offline. They recently posted a few updates with some redesign that attempt to make it work slightly better offline. Because the previous behavior was outright terrible for any mobile app. Problem is, while there’s improvements, it’s still a million years away from being a reliable email app. I guess I’m going to put my main pet peeves here, for anyone either considering buying in, or maybe perhaps someone knowing a workaround.

-Email contents continue to being unsearchable (search only works on email subject). They kinda sorted this on the desktop browser version. Kinda. You can optionally download a large cache with your mailbox within the browser’s storage permission for the proton page, and you can actually search messages by their contents in their bodies. This is not an option at all on the app. And the mobile browser version doesn’t offer it either. So if you’re not next to your computer, Proton in your phone is useless to find any email.

-Offline behavior is still bad. While it seems to download a cache of emails, there’s no way to know if an specific email is available offline or not, and it’s just the email subject with nothing else. This only becomes obvious once you are offline and try to open its contents (while…travelling? Boarding a plane? Good luck in those moments if you don’t have data, and preferably a computer too). -Offline behavior follow-up: Email sending stays in the ‘sent’ folder. No way to know if an email is actively being sent/uploaded to the server, or it’s actually an already sent message. Unless you turn offline and find out the bad way.

-The app doesn’t behave like a normal Android provider for neither contacts, emails or calendar events. THat means, if you try to sync Proton Calendar events to your watch, you’re SOL. I don’t believe Proton email offers itself if you tap on an .eml file, and definitely you can’t show your proton contacts in any other app, or easily share contacts from other apps to Proton. And while yes, there can be strong arguments to be made about how Google handles privacy in Android, there’s people using GrapheneOS that don’t use Google at all, just Android. This is an Android feature, not a Google feature. And the option should be given to the user to choose to sync their data.

Sorry for the rant/venting post. Any thoughts on this? Any possible solutions? Any roadmaps for when are these going to be addressed?