Tell HN: Protonmail No Longer Allows Contact Management in Android | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Protonmail No Longer Allows Contact Management in Android

5 pointseth0up5 comments

Proton has seemingly disabled contact management in Android. Any attempt to add, remove or modify contacts displays a message as follows:

    Available on web
    Creating contacts or groups in the app is not yet ready. For now, you can create them in the web app and they'll sync to your device

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Wanting contact management in your app is loser thinking actually (jk)

The speed at which Proton is vibe-coding their services means you should expect feature regressions on the regular. Shipping MVP is on the table so long as impossible roadmaps are met.

I don't know why they are doing this. I do know, that contact-management always worked fine — until for whatever reasons, they removed it. I usually assume a motive for such things. In this case, I can't come up with much, not seeing how they'd benefit from nudging users to use the web UI.

Apparently, if it works, break it.

Enshittification is Lord. Amen

In my experience, feature regressions like these are due to some kind of service migration, data pipeline refactor, or etc, all in service of some future end-state that has more features but constrained by the MBA-brained roadmapping requirements that sees MVP releases with major regressions first.

I appreciate any effort to explain or speculate the subject. You appear to have a much greater depth of insight than I.

Objectively, it seems a highly implausible and strangely critical component of an email system to break. So, anything anyone offers to help understand it, is of value to me. Read-Only contacts is pretty weird at first glance.

I think the most you can infer out of it is that leadership is prioritizing speed-of-release far more than anything else including major feature regressions (much of which should have been identified as blockers during the design/spec/dependency mapping phases and really should have been made doubly visible during testing).

I've gotten this feeling that they've really shifted from being privacy-focused and building out their core platform to becoming growth-focused and wanting to be an 'everything' platform since they rolled out Lumo AI, a half-baked 'private' LLM before they got around to rolling out a spreadsheet application - and they're still missing something equivalent to Google Forms.

It's one of many reasons I'm no longer going to renew my subscription.

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