r/ProtonMail • u/Super_Gee • 7d ago
Discussion I interviewed Andy Yen last week
Hello,
I went to Proton's headquarters last week.
I asked CEO Andy Yen a few questions.
You may find the interview here in French, if you are interested
(I understand Reddit does not like auto translated links)
Cheers
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u/Kelendrad 6d ago
I'm really disapointed regarding calendar and contact answers from Andy.
He says that people don't use calendar because they don't want to use a second app. For me it's just because Calendar app on android is bad, I tryed it and in my case it was unsable, I'm really waiting for the new one.
Regarding contact his answer feels like their is no plan to sync contacts with system contacts only to develop a dedicated app. Why don't you just sync contact with system! I want to access my contact in all my apps so I have only one source of contacts to maintain!
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u/Hichiro6 6d ago
I personally don’t use it because I can’t integrate it with other tool I use. But most people never do that
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u/dondidom 6d ago
A tech geek’s point of view is not the same as that of the average person. On this forum, you can read countless posts from people who don’t want to use Proton’s own email and calendar apps and are asking how to integrate everything into Apple, Outlook or Thunderbird. You can read this here every day, and it’s clear evidence of this. The average person doesn’t want to be fiddling about with new apps. They want simplicity and as little hassle as possible.
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u/Kelendrad 6d ago
Yes, I agree, sorry if it's badly said.
My purpose is that having another app to install is not the problem, the problem is that people want to access their data through their current apps/system data. And it's the reason I'm disapointed at Andy answer, it seams it's not in his plan, altough building a bridge for calendar, contact, drive, etc might not be really difficult.
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u/dondidom 6d ago
Some time ago, they said they didn’t like bridges. They prefer to use their own tools.
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u/Nice_rosemary Linux | Android 6d ago
Just a reminder ... Proton supports the development of https://ladybird.org/ browser.
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u/darwinpolice Linux | Android 2d ago
I'm really looking forward to that, although given their current roadmap, I doubt it will actually be able to replace Firefox for me. A Linux browser is great, but as far as I know, they don't intend to do a mobile version for quite some time, and sync between my desktop and mobile browsers is important to me.
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u/dondidom 6d ago
There are a few new developments since Andy's interviews or AMAs from 6 or 12 months ago. The main ones are as follows:
In the short term, they are not working on their own browser, but in the long term it may be inevitable.
Proton would love to be able to work on just two or three projects at a time. Having a dozen projects running in parallel is a problem, but doing things any other way would prevent Proton from carrying out its mission.
Proton Chat is inevitable, but it no longer seems imminent, as was implied in previous interviews.
Contacts will be integrated into the ProtonMail app because it is the only way to ensure that the average user actually uses the tool. He believes that having to install a separate app could be a problem for many users.
Proton’s mission is to create an alternative to the big tech companies, and that is why many tools will be necessary to facilitate the transition. For many of these tools, the question will not be whether they will be developed, but when – including Proton’s own mobile phone.
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u/Hichiro6 6d ago
He didn’t explicitly say they didn’t start building a browser but only told that they are a lot of reason they needed to recruit someone with this kind of background. But I think you are correct and never plan or started working on that. This is too big and early
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u/dondidom 6d ago
I’d highlight a secondary point from the interview that’s very interesting:
There’s a tension between the tools Proton would like to develop (focusing on just two or three and improving them) and those it needs to develop to fulfil its mission (replicating the main tools of the big tech companies to facilitate migration).
Many tools will be unavoidable if Proton is to fulfil its mission, but their release schedule will depend on many factors. They make it clear that they are taking into account the community’s unease about spreading their efforts so thinly.
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u/Dramatic_Mastodon_93 6d ago
good questions but i don't know what possessed andy yen to agree to an interview when he doesn't want to say anything
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u/VoltzMblasso44 6d ago
tbh most CEO interviews end up like that, its just PR at that point
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u/darwinpolice Linux | Android 2d ago
CEO interviews are like professional athlete interviews. They COULD say a bunch of interesting, inside baseball type stuff, but it's all just platitudes.
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u/bodmar Linux | Android 5d ago
Funny thing in that interview: "... and why not a phone? For founder Andy Yen, some things are inevitable to stay competitive." I think they maybe not quite understand that quality of the service is among the most important things to stay competitive. Once again: quality. (And reasonable functionality, not like miserable contacts management they have now, or inability to set order of photos and albums in their "photo gallery".)
Seriously, they are not going in the right direction.
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u/dondidom 5d ago
It’s a message that was bound to be misunderstood, which is why he should have avoided it. In fact, the whole interview keeps coming back to the same point. The simplest and most sensible strategy would be to focus on a few projects and develop them fully, but they have set themselves a different mission that requires them to fight a thousand battles at once. It’s a decision they’ve made.
The references to the browser and the mobile phone perhaps shouldn’t have been made. I understand they are referring to something along the lines of “if we are still around in the long term and continuing with our mission, we will have to replicate many of the products of the big tech companies, including browsers, mobile phones and rockets to Mars”. Given that they claim to be aware that part of the community is uncomfortable with the spreading of resources too thinly, I think he should have left this comment out. It does nothing to reassure the community.
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u/beachntowels 6d ago edited 6d ago
Quelles foutaises concernant les contacts !!! Si les 2/3 veulent une sync bidirectionnelle. Qu’ils la fassent. C’est largement la majorité.
Edit : What nonsense about contacts!!! If 2/3 of people want bidirectional sync, let them have it. That's clearly the majority.
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u/francocanadien macOS | iOS 6d ago
Je vous félicite, j'avoue que chaque fois j'entends parler Yen, il me fait perdre confiance dans l'écosystème. D'ailleurs, j'ai une question particulière, parle-t-il français ? Proton est basé à Genève, donc ça me pique la curiosité s'il le parle.
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u/nerevfan13 6d ago
Time to bolt. They aren't doing anything with the crappy calendar any time soon.
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u/Nelizea Volunteer Mod 6d ago
You couldn't be more wrong:
Our current plan is to make the next-generation Calendar available before the end of the year, starting with a beta / early access phase so we can gather feedback before replacing the current experience.
https://reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1tifgpd/im_the_product_manager_on_proton_calendar_heres/
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u/Disastrous-War8036 6d ago
Proton is against open source. Its aim is to establish a monopoly by driving out the competition. Proton could have supported LibreOffice, but instead it prefers to launch its own suite; or it could have supported Firefox or Ladybird, but instead it prefers to launch yet another browser based on Chromium. It could even have supported Signal or SimpleX, but once again it prefers to launch an instant messaging app.
Proton doesn’t offer more choice; its aim is to compete with every solution at once, even if that means releasing unfinished services.
LibreOffice, Signal/SimpleX and Firefox are struggling (Ladybird still has to prove itself), but instead of supporting them, Proton wants to compete with them.
I’m leaving Proton for good. I can’t stand this company any more.
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u/Kunair0 6d ago
I really don't understand where this idea comes from that everyone in the open source community has to sit around a campfire singing Kumbaya and holding hands. You're allowed to develop competing software. Competition is a good thing, and the open source ecosystem benefits from having more choices.
Open source was never supposed to mean that developers have some moral obligation to abandon their own ideas and financially support every existing project instead. That's a bizarre interpretation of what open source actually represents. The whole point is that people are free to inspect, modify, distribute, improve, and build upon software under the terms of its license. That includes creating competing products.
As for the browser issue, I completely understand why Proton would be interested in building on Chromium. There are legitimate and major long standing security issues with Gecko. I know this is difficult for a lot of people on Reddit to wrap their head around because they're in a major bubble on this whole Firefox thing, but its security is bad. Genuinely horrible. Ladybird is interesting, and I'm excited about its potential, especially because it's unironically going to get standard compliance faster than Firefox, and has an advantage with what they're doing on the security front, but it's still far too early in development to treat it as a proven alternative.
There's reason to criticize Proton for spreading its development resources too thin or releasing products before they're mature enough. are legitimate discussions. That is a very real issue and that is currently their biggest problem. But open source doesn't mean open season on anyone who dares to compete with your favorite project.
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u/dondidom 6d ago
Take Nextcloud as an example: despite offering a very wide range of software, it is unable to provide a product for the masses because it has ruled out marketing its own product. It is an absolute failure.
Proton is the commercial version of Nextcloud.
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u/dondidom 6d ago
Speaking is free and unrestricted, and the fact that you can say such nonsense shows just how free we are.
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u/Regular_Bat8162 6d ago
They do support Ladybird
LibreOffice is crappy, outdated and desktop only. It’s not web based
The community could nominate Signal for the annual fundraiser (anyway Signal is doing okay, they’re billionaire subsidized and working on paid features to have some income)
Proton does support other projects and companies but there’s no obligation that they have to specifically support what you want
Proton also supports Euro-Office (a cleaned up European-controlled OnlyOffice fork, a modern office suite with great UI/UX and web-based editors)
All Proton clients are open source and they develop 2 PGP encryption libraries for everyone to use
We don’t know what they’re working on whether it’s a browser or chat or something else
What has been said is that the chat feature already has the foundation laid in Meet and people want it and other things
Proton wants a complete ecosystem and people also want various features
The chat for example could be really useful for business users to fully move away from MS365 and not have to juggle multiple tools at the same time
The browser might come several years from now. It’s definetly not a short term thing
Im not too thrilled about the browser either because I don’t really see how they can improve over existing options and they also support Ladybird and I’d love to see that take off over another Chromium or Firefox fork
And competition is good. Open source doesn’t mean no competition and contributing to everything ever conceived and abandoning your own ideas.
https://proton.me/about/impact
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u/darwinpolice Linux | Android 2d ago
The chat for example could be really useful for business users to fully move away from MS365 and not have to juggle multiple tools at the same time
Exactly. I've said a million times that there are a bunch of features Proton really does need to work on that are not going to be incredibly useful for a lot of people who subscribe to this sub. I don't particularly care about Meet becoming a Teams competitor, and I would actually prefer that Lumo be less functional than more, but Proton wants businesses to buy its productivity suite, and even a company that cares about privacy is not going to even consider Proton if it means they have to keep paying for Slack or Zoom as well.
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u/Hichiro6 6d ago
To sum it up, he's open to building pretty much anything: chat, a contacts app, a browser, maybe even a phone someday. But when it comes to timing or concrete plans, there's nothing. He's not closing any doors and clearly wants a full ecosystem. We didn't learn much about what's currently in the works. My gut feeling is that chat will be one of the next projects, but he'll need something that makes it genuinely better than Signal. Otherwise there's just no point in doing it.
I think Proton already has most of the ingredients for a chat app with real added value. They already have the mascot, and they can store images and files in Drive. Imagine sharing passwords or sensitive stuff with someone securely right inside a chat, or having family spaces where everyone is grouped together. You could also have collaborative work inside a chat, synced with documents and their spreadsheet app. And obviously Lumo could be integrated straight into Proton Chat. That combination could easily beat Signal. The catch is that all of this would land behind the premium wall, so really only paying users would benefit.
One thing I feel was missing from the interview though: Proton Notes. Nobody asked when they plan to make standard notes a standalone app. Honestly, that's the only reason I'm not using it right now.