Proton launches its own version of Google Docs

I see that they claim all of their apps and libraries are open source[0]. But they only link to the OpenPGP libraries they're using. Is this actually open source? Following the "Open Source" footer link[1], here they only link to the ProtonMail Github account with nothing mentioning ProtonDrive.

And if it is actually open source, I'd love to see a comparison to CryptPad[2]

> which is why we’ve made all our apps and encryption libraries open source

[0] https://proton.me/drive/security

[1] https://proton.me/community/open-source

[2] https://cryptpad.org/

Seems like Proton is chasing the mythical customer that wants to run their company on the Proton suite (mail, calendar, drive, docs), because for some reason being super private is very important to the company.

I don't think this segment exists. Most companies' top priority is a no hassle and reliable stack (Google or Microsoft) and not one that is trying to catch up from a feature standpoint.

They should just focus on their main customer segment: individual users.

(Paying customer) I wish they would focus more on their existing product(s). There's a huge synergy between Calendar and Mail, but Drive, Pass, VPN, are useless (but the VPN is well-done). There's still no Caldav support or scheduling, and a lot of things are annoying in Mail, of course some of these are hard to solve with E2E, but at this point, their E2E claim is also half-baked and mostly for marketing, why not fix all of things?

What's the rationale behind releasing yet another half-baked product?

Seems like a massive distraction from their offering for a small company, wonder why they didn't consider something like tight integration with OnlyOffice or similar. Setting out to build a new office suite feels about as sensible as building a new web browser from scratch. Except at least with a browser, you have open specs helping you through most of the endless supply of compatibility problems.

I always feel conflicted by these kind of announcements, because for me there is significant value in spreading my dependencies across different companies, to reduce risk. I think Proton are great, I would like them to succeed - but I'm not sure I want to put all my eggs in their basket.

This is good news considering that it's amazing that in 2024 we still don't have any decent alternative to the Google Docs suite that is not Microsoft.

In our small company we tried a self hosted Nextcloud instance and we ended up moving away from that after years of pain. Now we are in HedgeDoc, that is neither ideal because of its lack of central way to manage files collectively, etc. So, I guess good news.

I’ve been a paid Proton user for about a year now and I can’t recommend it highly enough. They’re seriously hard core about security and privacy and the usability is easily a match for any comparable offering.

When Google CAPTCHAs me on every single query from a known reputable exit node, yeah, I want that security.

I've evaluated Proton multiple times over the years as a replacement for my existing solution, though each time it feels a bit off. I don't quite know why, but there's too much going on and, from what I understand, much of it is still half-baked or too inconvenient to use.

Meanwhile, the iPhone app is still so unreliable, I wouldn't sign up for Protonmail again today if I wasn't already in it.

Pity, because on desktop - and, when it works, on mobile, it works great. I really like the company.

Switching email addresses has so much friction - maybe I should keep a notebook of everyone who has my address so I can let them know of my new address.

How good is the proton ecosystem if I have multiple mail addresses and calendars?

Say I have hello@example.com and hello@example.net, can I use one unified inbox, and can I use both addresses to send and receive calendar invites?

Moreover, how easy is it to combine my calendars with my work calendar?

I heard it's also not possible to sync contacts with iOS, is that true?

Lexical contributor here. I love what you've build here! A full-fledged collaborative rich text editor. I'm glad that Lexical worked well for you, we'd be happy to take your feedback throughout the development process, you can reach out to me over Discord by the same username or on our server.

[dupe]

Announcement post: https://proton.me/blog/docs-proton-drive

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40864549)

I’m so happy to see this. I’m not sure why people are complaining here. Maybe you just aren’t their target audience. But many of us want a privacy focused alternative to big tech.

No not that[1] Proton.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)

Emails, password manager, VPN, and now documents—absolutely not a wise thing to do. Never put all your eggs in one basket; your whole personal and even professional life shouldn't be entrusted to a single company.

Did Engadget jump the gun on this one? I don't see a link, blog post or press release on any of Proton's sites, and I don't see a link in the article.

There are many Google Docs alternatives, including some great open source options such as HedgeDoc and Outline.

What is missing a great Excel or Sheets alternative. I wanted to break my business out of the Google Workspace ecosystem earlier this year, but the lack of a good spreadsheets alternative was one of the main things holding me back.

(Paying customer) I wish they concentrated more on their core offerings and making them as solid as possible.

If they developed an entire (web) wordprocessor from scratch that seems like an enormous effort and cost quite outside of the core offerings.

If they have (or will) open source it that would be grand.

I am a long paid user of ProtonMail so I am glad to see more services. I am trying it now using Safari on iPadOS and it is functional except for one thing: the page layout is very narrow, just 50 columns, and I don’t see how to change that.

Proton's offical page about it, in case you want to head directly to the source: https://proton.me/drive/docs

They are falling into the hole of adding products on top of products, while their core apps are decaying.

Please. Fix. The. Android app! It's unusable. I feel like I beg for them to do this in every yearly survey, and then they change the design a little bit, it loses a few features and gets some new ones, while missing basic stuff like unmarking an email as spam. This wouldn't be a problem if it was possible to use K9 or AquaMail with Proton, but that's obviously not an option.

Does Proton support calendar delegation yet? (Same for Fastmail. Supporting assistants would open up their market.)

Google docs’ value is the network effects. Everyone has a Google account, so GDocs is like a universal collaboration tool. Does not seem like there’s a huge space for something like this, it’s going to be a huge pain every time I want to share a doc with someone. Seems like it would be way better to try and distinguish their already successful products by continuing to improve their feature set. For example: their email search bar is hot garbage. Give me the perfect email and calendar client and I’ll be subscriber forever, but I definitely don’t want to pay for an ecosystem of half-finished Google knockoffs

I just noticed this: "You can upload .docx documents, edit them". Only docx is supported?

Daily reminder Proton snitched their users:

https://restoreprivacy.com/protonmail-discloses-user-data-le...

Does the other person need a proton account to use it as well?

Has anyone (Proton included) talked about their E2EE encryption claims for this web-based document editor? My understanding of E2EE on the web is that it's as much marketing hype as it is true security, given that they can freely break it at any time they please.

Have they actually attempted to solve any problems associated with this space or are they just claiming it and getting the marketing points?

One of these days I might finally move off of just the Mail (~3$ per month) and onto a bigger plan.

VPN might be nice so my ISP doesn't yell at me for torrenting if I screw it up, and my copy of VueMinder is getting pretty ancient at this point. I could stand to get a newer calendar app.

Proton does a lot of open source washing. Their public communication often mention that they are open source, while in reality only some of their clients are open source and the uploaded source code[1] often lags behind by months (currently 3 months).

[1]: https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients

This title is beyond confusing, and the article doesn't even attempt to make it clearer. What does "own version of Google Docs" even mean? I took two reads of the article to understand that Proton's "flavor of Google Docs" actually has nothing to do with Google and is just a collaborative document product that intends to compete with Google Docs. The title makes it sound like Proton is offering a reskinned-Google-Docs-in-an-iframe which is incredibly odd.

Proton seems to be suggesting that this is somehow more secure than Google Docs [1].

But Google Docs/Workspace already supports what they call "client-side encryption" [2] if you want to pay for it and enable it. Docs never sees your actual data.

How is this any different?

Trying to go up against MS Office and Google Docs/Workspace sounds like an unbelievably difficult, huge, and therefore risky proposition -- akin to writing your own browser from scratch and trying to compete with Chrome, Edge, and Safari. Not really sure this is a wise business move for Proton.

[1] https://proton.me/blog/docs-proton-drive

[2] https://support.google.com/a/answer/10741897?hl=en