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Comment by futevolei | Hacker News Reader

Can ProtonMail focus on getting mail right before adding calendar and vpn and whatever else they pump in their newsletter? Their mobile email is atrocious- hello threading email chains? I was hoping to use this as a gmail replacement but it’s not even capable of replacing my spam yahoo account at this point. I support the cause but it seems like they are trying to do too much with too little.

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> Can ProtonMail focus on getting mail right before adding calendar and vpn and whatever else they pump in their newsletter?

Once companies grow past a handful of employees they usually go from everyone being a generalist who can work on every part of all their product to having specialists who only can deal with some of what the company does.

The various sites that report corporate information put the number of Proton employees in the 160-250 range. They are almost certainly well into the specialist phase. The people working on calendar and VPN and whatever would likely not be able to help with mobile email if they were shifted to that. If mobile email needs more work than those currently working on it can do, Proton needs to bring in more mobile and/or email specialists.

It would only make sense then to stop calendar and VPN work if they do not have sufficient budget to bring in people to help with mobile email and need to lay off people from other projects to free up the money.

> they usually go from everyone being a generalist

Interesting point.

At the same time, I think it won't take long at all for someone who develops a calendar mobile app to switch to working on an email mobile app. -- But maybe you meant the email web client? (Web vs native development?)

I think you're right that a VPN and related Linux kernel and networking is a different type of specialization, yes.

Proton Mail, if you're listening, the terrible mobile experience is why I'm switching providers. You promised a new mobile app, but it's been years and you've got nothing to show for it.

Would using the default app with IMAP provide threading?

Because IMAP requires a locally running daemon they call Bridge. So works for Desktop only not mobile

Its why I went away from ProtonVPN. No WireGuard support. Still not AFAIK.

The Android VPN app has just had wireguard added. It's not on the pc or iOS version I believe as of now

Heh, I need it in CLI, not Android. Practically the only thing I use VPN for is downloading some torrents, in a Docker container (Rtorrent). That they only now added it in Android makes me glad I left them approx 1,5 years ago.

The missing threading on mobile and overall app experience was what made me not switch to protomail. It wasn't the actual missing feature but the fact that when I googled for it I found people requesting this feature several years ago (maybe 2016) up until now and staff doesn't give any answer. So I thought it might not be the most customer focused business.

The mobile app is so bad, nearly nothing works the way it should. Tap a Notification, you‘re lucky if the right mail opens, try to attach images on iOS? For while it sent HEIV images instead of jpegs, so normal people were out of luck; hope it doesn‘t crash? It does. The UI is also pretty ugly.

But it‘s not only the app that is bad, the web client was quite functional for a while apart from the missing login persistence. Then came the new UI now it just kind of works. Try to move/tag many mails after each other? Now you also have to deal with clicking away success boxes as they start piling up and overlapping the very UI elements you are trying to reach. There are threads but for some reason they are way more cumbersome to use than GMail’s. Everything is gigantic now as well. I haven‘t checked yet but during the beta I could just not find some settings anymore. Hope they got added before launch.

Android user here. I've not used the iOS version so cannot say what the differences are, but it works really well and is highly rated within the Play store. I imagine however that iOS users have higher standards, because let's be honest the majority of apps on the play store are garbage.

Wow so much hate for the mobile email client. I’ve been a happy user for a couple years now, I’m surprised there is so much distaste. Maybe I’m just not that picky? :)

On this subject, I thought the recent upgrade of the email web client was nice. Maybe we can hope for something similar with mobile soon?

Makes me wonder, maybe they get more emails and then get more frustrated about problems

(How many emails do you get per day?)

I suspect you are right. I’m definitely not an email ‘power user’, not getting a huge volume of emails. So the issues aren’t as obvious to me.

Yeah I agree. I was trying to be a protonmail customer, but there was just too much friction.

In addition to the subpar UI, I was trying to import my (admittedly large) gmail mailbox into Protonmail, and it just did not work. I let it run for days, had to restart it, repeated the process for weeks, and after about 4 weeks I just had to give up…

It’s a shame because I really appreciate the security aspects of it, and the fact that they’re a small company / underdog.

But there’s just too much friction.

In contrast, I used to find pm email to be fine. I left the service for fastmail because I wanted a calendar built in. I’m considering going back now

Yeah, I wish more effort was spent on search and spam.

Very glad to see the security audit in any case.

I agree, UI and usability design look amateurish to me. It is time for me to look for a better alternative, their speed of improvement in above mentioned areas is just one big disappointment.

Agree. I wish they would focus and go deeper on fewer applications. Get email working well, then calendar, etc.

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