An object lesson on how to alienate your users

ProtonMail is a great service which allows users to escape privacy-invasion from the likes of Google and Gmail, and keep your conversations and affairs private to yourself; unfortunately, their iOS clients suck.

A few years back, in my quest to escape Google’s relentless invasion of my privacy, I moved out of Gmail and adopted Proton Mail as my provider: this has worked great and it also has the added advantage that my communication with other Proton Mail users are encrypted, and my data is stored securely; I can also use my own “vanity domain” for my email, and have been able to add more users from my family, who are similarly privacy-minded.

Their web client, while not perfect, has been recently updated and improved with good usability results, and their support (those rare times one needs them) is very responsive and knowledgeable.

I am a happy customer, and I have been recommending them to friends and colleagues — this would be a perfect story of “I escaped Google and I am happy.”

Alas, their iOS clients are terminally horrible.

I mean, imagine something that would look dated on a Nokia phone circa 2010 — that bad.

Not only their UX is “undergrad, I’m learning iOS”-grade; not only they don’t support Dark Mode (oh, dear); they don’t support threaded conversations…