I actually appreciate how they balance features and new products. They are becoming more credible MS365/Google Workspace alternatives with every step.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1bptl3c/shared_...
Google docs may not be private but it takes <1 second to load when I click the browser bookmark, vs 11 seconds to load a Proton document.
11-second load time for a page is a lot of friction in 2026, no matter how secure your product is.
I would love to build on proton but Alas the API isn't open source and recently with Proton meet and its controversy, my trust on proton has shifted a bit too which dampened my enthusiasm in all of this.
(To make the API I even used puppeeter instances to do it, and after quite a long time I was able to succeed actually but that's just not scalable)
I also wish I could afford Proton as a non-pro user…
Business users are their focus and outside select industries, vast majority of businesses don't care if government is spying or not. Heck, most businesses would turn over information to government without any fight. It's just not something they worry about.
No complains from it so far. People get it, book with success, and I run those calls on Proton Meet, which also proved to work pretty well.
So does that mean two people using this in the US will both have high latency to another country?
LiveKit Cloud uses virtual compute and networking across multiple (USA based) cloud providers. DigitalOcean, Google and Oracle at minimum. They each have servers all of the world of course, but the controlling entity(s) parent companies are all based in the USA.
Latency shouldn’t be a problem, it's handled by a global CDN.
Proton including that part about geopolitical instability implies that Meet is does not fall under the USA's CLOUD Act - that would be wrong. The metadata of any Meet call could be handed to USA authorities, for example the participants date & time, source IP and useragent of each member. The call itself should be E2E encrypted.
I do worry about it and I think lots of people will as well for other reasons.
One of them is screen sharing.
/s
Edit: I thought you were joking and that the answer was more like printing presses and a lack of an official "standard English" in the 1700s/1800s, but it turns out the answer really was closer to what you said. Noah Webster deliberately decided to make American English diverge from British English when he wrote his dictionary.
Proton makes safer, more private (than, say, Gmail) email a possibility for people who don't have much technical knowledge but who know enough to want to keep their emails out of Google's hands.
If you have both the knowledge and time to run a server, by all means, that can make sense (and can be fun!). It's just not as widely applicable.
The point of ownership is having your mails in your hand, on your iron, anything who can talk IMAPs or even POP is ok for that. For voice/chat etc Matrix or XMPP might be yours, so nobody could decide to ban you or shut the service down. You still depend on a ISP ok, but much less dependencies anyway. That's the point IMVHO.
While thinking that company X is better in privacy terms than company Y is honestly meaningless, you can trust them or not, you don't know what happen on their servers or someone else ones where they actually live on (like using Amazon o Microsoft cloud as a backend).
proton meet is already targeting a really niche set of customers, and you're taking it to another level.
