We also have the same issue as the original poster. We need to be able to choose and sync files on MacOS so that they become searchable. Also, we need to be able to not just select some folders to be downloaded to be offline but need to have the option of selecting everything to be offline all the time. We do not live in an environment that allows continuous connectivity.

Two days ago I had upgraded my unlimited account to the Duo so that my wife and I could replace our box.com accounts with ProtonDrive. After waiting two days for our 1TB of box.com data to migrate to ProtonDrive, when I went to configure a shared folder that we use so we can both access our common and critical documents (5GB, 9K files...), I find out that oops, shared folders only work with ProtonDrive on Windows, not with ProtonDrive for MacOS.

Of course the web version of the shared folders is useless as I'm never going to tell her "honey, when you search for something, if you can't find it with Spotlight, please open your browser, login proton, and search for it there too. Oh... ergh... sorry, uhm... ehm.., don't be too upset, but if you download it and then update the document, please don't forget to re-upload it in the same place, you know, the directory 4 levels down from the top".

I want a happy marriage, so unfortunately I'm going to cancel Duo, keep on spending an extra $45/month to keep our Box accounts, and hope that eventually the guys at Proton will improve the MacOS version.

Isn't it a privacy risk? This is an answer from Lumo:

Syncing shared folders would indeed be convenient, but it would force Proton Drive to store decrypted copies on your Mac. macOS Spotlight (and any other local process) could then read those files in plain text, which defeats Proton’s end‑to‑end encryption and zero‑access guarantees. Because of that, Proton has deliberately left shared‑folder sync unavailable on macOS, and there’s no indication it will change in the near term. The safest workaround is to keep shared items in the web/app interface and only download the specific files you need to search locally.

This is critically important to me. I learned the hard way that folder and file sharing is not so robust with a certain large tech company. My wife and I share sensitive data, so I absolutely need this feature and I need it done right. Proton, I'm counting on YOU!

Same here : it's a “must have" feature to share documents with my family

It would be very adventageous to get this on the urgent line. The lack of this feature is really preventing us from working efficiently.

I would like to switch to proton drive with my entire family and small business but this feature ist a must have that prevents me from doing so.
Current sharing solution is insufficient.

I agree, and not just for spotlight. As a business user I want to be able to create shared folders that are much more conveneient to access for my small team - having to go onto the web for files doesn't cut it.

This is super important to me as well. This is the one last bit I miss to ditch most of the other cloud storage I'm currently using. I have a proton family account and we need to be able to share files in the mac OS desktop app.

I have the same issue, my wife and I share folder, however, every time I want add or access what she share, I need to got to the web application. Same applies for her trying to access what I shared with her. This is annoying and takes too much time, which caused us to duplicate the files and simple share them via e-mail or other means.

I'm a duo subscriber together with my partner, and shared folders not being synced makes collaborating on shared files very difficult.

This is especially true for shared spreadsheets (excel), which currently can't be edited in the online version. This means we can't update spreadsheets owned by the other person unless we download, edit, and then upload the new file.

I have been a paid proton subscriber for years, and recently signed my wife (a Mac user) on as part of a Duo account, so that we could transition away from Dropbox for sharing family files and collaborating on forms and documents. Now we find that Proton Drive is basically unusable for that (very basic) purpose, and raises the question of why a Duo account would exist at all. When one person shares a folder with another, it should appear as any other folder on their machine, and sync automatically, regardless of operating system. This needs to be remedied immediately, it is absolutely foundational functionality for a cloud storage platform.

Echoing a lot of what's already been said here. From a Business user perspective this feature seems like an absolute "must have".

From a purely business use case this is such a major flaw. If I (on MacOS) share a folder from the Business account to a member of my team, they would have to:
1. Login to the web Drive.
2. Download a file to their computer (taken out of Proton Drive's protective environment)
3. Edit the file.
4. Hopefully upload again to the shared folder (put back in Proton Drive's protective environment).
5. Delete the file from the local machine.

Even if there are some assumptions made about how secure the user's environment is or isn't, this is just a terrible workflow. It almost ensures that a Business user will have random sensitive company files on their personal device outside of Proton Drive's environment. The likelihood that these files are all deleted is low.

This isn't even getting to the fact that I have a personal Proton Drive account as well, but don't have a method to sync both a Personal account and a Business account to the same device.

I agree with the sentiment here that Proton appears to be going wider when I feel like it needs to be going deeper. AI (Lumo) and the Bitcoin Wallet are cool, but I'd rather have more functionality in the core products. For instance, Tresorit has had this feature for a long time. Obviously Google has had this. So what's the incentive to use Proton Drive in current form instead of the competition? I say this as one of the earliest Proton paid users who really wants to see this become the absolutely easy recommendation. It's just hard to even show this to business people because they're going to look once and realize that Google Drive or Tresorit have the features they want and then continue to be so entrenched in those ecosystems they'll likely never look back.

Why are you guys focused on AI, VPNs, password managers and competing with Google Docs when you are missing basic features in your core products like the ability to have a unified inbox and syncing multiple drive accounts to one compute. It seems like you have lost your focus and core mission.

This feature is already available for the Proton iOS apps and according to https://proton.me/support/shared-with-me-windows it also is available for Windows. I suspect a healthy portion of your user base are Mac OS X users, and based on the comments in this thread there are a few who would like to further adopt Proton Drive but this is a blocking issue as it is with me. Getting the basics consistent across OS platforms is more important than additional features such as AI or trying to recreate Google Docs. Many of us are here because of Proton's mission, but we need the product to work consistently wherever we use it.

We use the sharing features in our family to securely store files, for instance health information on our kids. However, it's barely usable for our use case:
- from iOS, the "Files" app integration allows us to send files to Proton Drive, but the "Shared with me folder is not available there. So, the folder creator can add files this way, not the one who received it as a share
- from the web interface, we did not find a way to copy files from our "private" files to a "shared with me" folder. So, after I copied files to my private folder from iOS, I had to download them to my computer, unzip, then upload to the "Shared with me" folder. Far from user-friendly !

The "Shared with me" folder does not seem to be well integrated in the Proton Drive workflow.

I recently switched to Proton 'Duo' and found that it is not really 'duo' at all. There is no shared email function (voted and commented on elsewhere) and now I discover that there is no true shared document/folder feature with Proton Drive either.

As the owner of a folder, I can access it through Finder (macOS), make it available offline. My partner, who I shared the folder with, has no such access. As others have said, this seems to be a basic requirement, the lack of which would have changed my decision to pay for Proton Duo had I known about it.

I’d like to suggest adding a true two-way folder sync feature to Proton Drive. Ideally, I could select existing folders such as Documents, Pictures, Music, and Videos, and have them kept identical across all my devices. This is how I currently use MegaSync, and it allows my laptop and desktop to always have the same files in these folders without having to reorganize them into special Proton Drive directories. Furthermore, I can filter the files that are synced with my phone with the third-party app MegaSync, so I can have only *.pdf files on my phone.

Would be nice to at least have a due date for this important feature. I don't more software, I just need the existing to be "complete".

I bought proton-duo for sharing photo's with my wife. The idea was that we both upload photo's to our drive and both my wife and i see each-others photo's and we are both in sync. But preferably one drive where we both can upload and download photo's towards with our own accounts.