Privacy @lemmy.ml lemmyreader @lemmy.ml 2 mo. ago

When will Proton Mail be in F-Droid ?

EDIT : Option to vote for Official F-droid Repository https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/945460-general-ideas/suggestions/47173612-official-f-droid-repository

28 comments

Rather than asking us, consider asking the people in charge at Proton AG, and then letting us know what they say.
- I think I saw that Proton said in 2020 that the Proton Mail app would come to F-Droid. Sadly I cannot find that information any more. I thought about deleting my Proton mail account today but before doing so ask here about the state of a possible F-Droid app. Yes, I could ask the Proton people, and could also ask the F-Droid forum people but Lemmy feels most comfortable right now.
it's in a 3rd party repo. https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/ch.protonmail.android
- Thanks. But that is probably the Proton mail app that Izzy downloaded from Proton. Years ago Tutanota made changes to their app to DeGoogle it, and then F-Droid could include it. I'm a kind of DeGoogle person trying to avoid Google as much as possible and that is the reason I am asking when the Proton Mail app will be in the main F-Droid repo.
  
  Enjoy your tracking I guess
- This is the one I've been using for a long time, and it's worked well for me
A few months ago, Proton's CEO Andy Yen was interviewed on The Linux Experiment and reiterated in the segment starting at 49:27 that he does want to have an F-Droid version, but because Proton encrypts notifications sent through Play Services such that Google can't get at the metadata, and because third-party notification frameworks are typically much worse for battery life than Play Services, they consider F-Droid a lower priority than some of the other things they're trying to get done, such as feature parity between their mobile and desktop apps. It'll come eventually, especially as Yen himself seems to want it, but since they're completely private and have no investors, they don't have infinite money for developers, so they have to prioritize sustainable growth.

Highly recommend watching the full interview, Yen seems to have a good mindset about the whole thing, doing what he feels is best for privacy and ownership of identity in the long run, even if he has to temporarily compromise in some places in order to get there.
Probably never. Tuta is a better choice for de-googled phones, they don't depend on google play services for notifications and their notification implimentation uses negligible battery
- Take this for what you will there’s been no supplied evidence just throwing it out there
  
  Royal Canadian Mountain Police
  
  Yea, surely I can trust this article...
  
  Oh interesting, well once actual evidence comes out maybe I'll switch back, but like they mention in the article, the client, which does the encrypting is open source, so if there is a backdoor hopefully it's found soon
they wont say why they wont degoogle and fdroid it. for years and years. something "weird" is definitely going on
- 👍
Huh? Why not use K-9 or Fair Email?

They're both excellent email clients.
- Proton does not support IMAP/SMTP.
- Yes. But Proton wants users to pay for their bridge to use IMAP with Thunderbird. Not sure if their bridge works with K9-mail and FairEmail.
That's the only reason I won't use Proton, because the app and the network is not clean. The best security encryption is made from public protocols, so app and servers should be open source.
- Servers can not be made free and open source, that is just not how it works. There is no way of proving that a server can be trusted if you do not control the server.
  
  SaSS - service as a software substitute
  
  If servers can not be made frer and ooen source, why does BSD exist abd all of there free open source 3rd party ports?
- I did open an account once (for the free vpn), but ditched it very soon because it could not use a normal mail client. I need all my mail in one place, and I need convenient PGP however rarely it does happen.
They're in the middle of a rollout of a rewrite and have promised to publish the source soon.
- Do you have any source?
  
  Right from the horse's mouth ;)
  
  https://mastodon.social/users/protonprivacy/statuses/112162248226735964
But it is already on the IzzyOnDroid repo. And you can also just install from their github directly.
- IzzyOnDroid and direct install will install the Proton mail app with Google push notifications. With the main F-Droid repository the maintainers will check the source code. The small team of Tutanota mail app did away with Google in 2018 https://f-droid.org/2018/09/03/replacing-gcm-in-tutanota.html And as far as I know Signal messenger app is available without Google push but using websockets.
  
  Oh. Thanks for the information.
  
  IzzyOnDroid and direct install will install the Proton mail app with Google push notifications.
  
  I didn't even know that could be done.

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