Proton isn’t reinventing the wheel with this crypto wallet. But it’s another solid option for people looking to create a crypto wallet for the first time. However, cryptocurrencies tend to be a polarizing topic, so let’s see if Proton Wallet doesn’t hurt Proton’s brand image in the future.
- More information: Proton Blog Article
The reason people are mad with this is because Proton’s longstanding services are lacking basic features for months and years already with no update in sight, and in less than a month after a (now) controversial poll, Proton introduces AI and crypto wallet in their portfolio.
Genuinely wondering, what features are you talking about? Proton has a page for voting for features, and I definitely see highly voted ones get added.
Linux client is the biggest one I’m waiting for, but AFAIK they’ve said it’s planned, and I appreciate the support for Rclone in the meantime.
I could go on and on about those features on that page that are there for ages, but one struck me hard in the last hour: I tried cancelling my subscription, and after clicking on 6 “I’m sure” buttons and writing a reason why, I couldn’t cancel because I was using too much storage (3GB, free accounts have a 500MB limit). I deleted everything on my Drive and emptied the trash, tried again, no success. Deleted all my emails and emptied the trash, still failed. Deleted everything on Calendar and Pass, nothing. Couldn’t find anywhere how to contact support. There’s a small bar that shows how much storage I’m using, one would expect that clicking on it would show a summary of what’s using your storage, but all it does is show a popup with Proton’s subscription plans.
I can’t cancel my subscription because they don’t have the basic functionality of a storage usage summary.
Hmm… Is that a problem with their more recent endeavors? I myself have only used their email and pasword manager services and I find their feature sets to be sufficient.
Also, marketing containig the letters “A” and “I” does not invalidate the product. While I absolutely despise seeing AI plastered everywhere, it is true that ML algorithms are often incredibly useful (even if LLMs aren’t)
They’ve made a poll that had questions about AI, but no clear options to indicate that you don’t want anything to deal with AI. From the results, less than 20% of the voters signalled that they wanted an AI offering from Proton, those being business users, and less than a month later Proton introduces (to business accounts at the moment) a LLM that writes email for you (that has to decrypt and read plain text the emails that were supposed to be stored with zero access encryption), and it uses a model that was trained on copyrighted data without permission.
Not even two weeks later they come up with this crypto wallet, and both endeavours are on two very sensitive and controversial topics, to a point it seems Proton is “selling out” to techbros.
All the while, you can’t even create or edit folders and labels on their mail mobile apps.
Fair enough. I sure hope that “business” feature stays business-only or opti-in.
In a way I get it since from my experience the C-suites really like not writing their emails themselves so this is their way of trying not to lose existing corporate customers, however I do see how their lack of transparency is concerning.
