This is their monorepo for their clients, including Proton Drive:

https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients

I agree but I also think that individuals can benefit from this new offering. They don't have to get a Google/Microsoft account for basic office needs.

But I do agree that there are probably some better things to be done, I don't think they can be competitive long term, someone who needs just a little bit of collaboration or more advanced tools will run back to Google/Microsoft very fast.

In a way it reminds me of the Apple Office suite: kinda cool but also very limited in many ways and a nightmare to collaborate with a wide range of people. The things you might want to use it for are pretty niche...

Alternative hypothesis on "job to be done": individuals attempting to de-google themselves, at least on the productivity suite. This does involve the rest of the suite as well, as individual users do, actually, have docs on google drive.

You cannot know whether a customer exists for your product until you make it and publish it.

Proton has been doing this for a while, and they still exist. This means they have validated that some users exist for their product.

and the niche customers that do need Proton's level of privacy are often more comfortable with a selfhosted product

I'm even more convinced that me being a Fastmail customer is a good thing. Fastmail has been rock solid for years.

Their email, calendar and contacts solutions work well with iOS and android (using the DAVx app).

WebApps work flawlessly on Firefox. They have all sorts of customisation for spam filtering, catch all email addresses, etc.

They don't do all the things (vpn, passwords, drive, what have you). But what they do, they do very well.

As soon as somebody decides that a brand's future requires adding more top-level features rather than specializing in top-of-class delivery of core features, product design becomes an endless treadmill (death spiral?) of adding "yet another half-baked product"

That's not to say that "one thing well" products are sure to be viable, and the "bullet point maximizers" that dominate product design for the last 10-15 years may know best, but this is what it looks like once they run the show either way.

If this is a Proton grievance panel, I really wish they'd optimize their web app, at least with Firefox. If I leave the Protonmail tab open, the amount of CPU and RAM usage for Firefox just spikes up like crazy, and it shoots back down once I close that tab.

I can get around this with the ProtonMail Bridge and using Mutt, which works fine and makes me feel cool, but the web app is considerably more convenient.

CalDAV and CardDAV support missing is the only reason I still have a google account. I understand it's "tough" with e2ee but adding support to the bridge would be perfectly sufficient, then at least I could use local Calendar/Contact apps.

Also a paying customer. I completely agree. They keep doing this, widening their scope constantly while every new product launched seems to get less ongoing attention than the last one.

This. Also a paying customer. My Android mail app is definitely not fully baked. At times it drains my battery trying unsuccessfully to fetch notifications. Other times it fetches a ton of notifications I had already seen.

Proton is on a good path in many ways, but these rapid launches of new apps will kill the company if they don't do it well.

> What's the rationale behind releasing yet another half-baked product?

New product often means new segment of customers they can go after. Whereas refining existing ones will help reduce the churn.

Their sales/marketing pitch gets that much better.

Missing Caldav support is really painful. I've had to spin up my own Caldav container (Radicale) and leave Proton Calendar behind, but I'm still unable to send calendar event notifications from any calendar app on mobile, only from thunderbird.

Well I'm also a paying customer and I'm really glad they're doing this — this way I don't have to awkwardly piece together a VPN, a password manager, a mail client, a notes app, and a Google Docs alternative all from different places, probably paying separate subscriptions to each since I wouldn't trust free services. Instead I get a reasonably good suite of apps for everything privacy-related I need, all for $10/mo. The more they add, the more that money feels worth it and the more affirmed in my choice to pay it I feel.

The connection is encryption, and having all of these services paid for and therefore have better support. I really like protonpass so I was happy to see that I already pay for it

The VPN is "well-done" but "useless"?

They can't add direct caldav support because it's e2ee, they should add a caldav bridge to their mail bridge, they also should work on contact sync.

I agree that drive is underpowered, they still don't have a syncing client on Linux, and their android/iOS client is quite limited and the photo integration is really half baked. However Pass is really great, it has better UI/UX compared to Bitwarden.

> What's the rationale behind releasing yet another half-baked product?

I suspect they're attempting to build up an attractive package for business customers, competing with the likes of O365 and G-Suite. There's probably a lot more money in that than in personal email hosting.

> What's the rationale behind releasing yet another half-baked product?

Growth. I'm also a (happy) customer, I've been using their products for years and my personal impression is that they're trying to catch up and build a full productivity suite as fast as possible.

It is interesting to watch them try to grow so quickly. At some point they'll need to turn more profit to hold all this scale up. We'll see if they can stick to the privacy claims or start to sell out.

Agreed, happy paying customer but would rather see them investing in improving Drive. Seems like they're trying to get more enterprise-y which sucks.

I can't even search on the mobile app for android... I could about two years ago until they decided to push out half baked rewrites or something.

Edit: they have since added support for this, my bad --- I am still bummed that ProtonMail doesn't support automatic forwarding. Their rationale is that E2EE makes this impossible, but most of my incoming mail is unencrypted anyway, and I could decrypt the rest myself with Thunderbird and GPG. Lack of automatic forwarding support makes it harder to switch mail providers, on the other hand.

Talking of half-baked, one thing I find really frustrating is that on the mobile app you can't even see the mail headers of a message. Absurd

They are probably targeting to provide services for companies. It's hard to convince someone to pay for mail if your competition (like Google Suite or Ms365) offers mail AND a bunch of additional stuff. They also just want to tie customers to they services as much as possible to prevent them leaving

What irritates me is that their ProtonMail iOS client always sends a notification when I log into ProtonMail from my laptop and I can't turn that notification off without turning off all notifications. I don't want to be spammed by yet another useless security-freak notification.

On the one hand I can agree with this—I would love them to focus on refining the current suite of Proton apps.

On the other hand, Google’s ability to monitor the contents of Google Docs and engage in censorship is extremely concerning and Proton seems well-placed to provide an alternative.

It's not going to be as half baked as other products they've released in the past that were made from scratch because this is basically Standard Notes that they bought directly integrated in Drive.

Also a paying customer, I'd like it if they would email an invoice every month instead of me needing to go login to the web UI and dig for it when I do my monthly tax reporting.

   1. Everyone make invoices PDF
   2. Send them out every month
   3. If I need to log in, make them easy to find on the first page
   4. Name them <company>-<invoice>-<date>-<number>-<amount>.pdf

(Paying customer) Yes! I cant believe I still cant share a folder with another account on proton drive (apart from read-only sharing via link), but now instead they add .....

I can see it as trying to compete with say a google in all competencies.

So hopefully once they have tool parity with Gsuite they would buckle down and work on features of each application?

I use pass for all my TOTP and keep my passwords separate with KeepassXC. It works really well.

I agree and wish for Calendar to use much better integration

PMs get promoted when doing the shiny new thing instead of improving the dull old thing.

Yep.

In the end I switched away from proton due to their negligence on this core product suite.

I love Proton Mail, but their mailbox search on Android is just awful.

I don't think they built this from scratch, they acquired a company that did something similar (Standard Notes) and are using their technology to build this.

They can't, all proton products are end to end encrypted, typical solutions like onlyoffice won't work.

Then you should welcome the announcement as it offers yet another alternative for hosting docs. I don't think Proton implies that you must use the entire bundle of services — you could always mix and match them with other providers (or self-host, for the ultimate freedom).

This specific case seems reasonable. Mail implies Drive (you want to keep large attachments somewhere), both imply Docs (you want to preview those docs somewhere and maybe add some edits).

If you want to diversify, Pass may be a good candidate for not using it.

This is how I see it. People arent thrilled that they aren't as feature rich in other products (cal/mail) but I see it as trying to compete with the whole of Gsuite. And hopefully the more niche features that a hyper technical hackernews reader might want will come then.

Is Zoho another decent alternative? I hear a good amount of praise for it here, but don't know which product(s) people are referring to and what they're good at.

Wonder why you don't use Google Docs if they do the job ?

Apple Pages as well. It has a web-based cloud version, and it's free. I haven't used it enough to speak on the quality, though.

Zoho?

Google Docs isn't even good, though? Give me MS Office or even LibreOffice running on the desktop any day of the week. I hate when I work at a place that makes use of Google's shitty imitation.

Interesting take. I was a paying personal customer who switched away from ProtonMail. I appreciate it for what it is, but ultimately for me it was just way too slow. The website is incredibly sluggish, and the mobile app is worse. I spent a good 5-10 seconds waiting on a loading screen everything I wanted to check my email.

"much of it is still half-baked"

Imo, it's not. It's more like 80% baked. More than good enough for daily use, but not on the level of polish or quality of any of the market leaders. Proton Drive is not as nice and convenient as Dropbox, Proton Mail is not as nice and convenient Gmail, Proton Pass is not as nice and convenient as 1Password, and so on.

But each of their offerings are good enough to get the job done, the price is fair, and you get the added privacy.

> it feels a bit off. I don't quite know why

Maybe, subconsciously, you’ve learnt not to put all your eggs in one corporate basket.

It’s years and billions behind Google. It’s a lot of work to catch up. I’ve been really happy with them and it’s great having my email domains through them