Anonymous
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1,389 votes
An error occurred while saving the comment An error occurred while saving the comment Anonymous commented
For what it's worth, the Protonmail APK will run without Google Play Services installed, there are just no push notifications. However, there are some things that are annoying about this that seem to be remarkably easy for Protonmail to fix:
1. It would be nice if the APK could be downloaded directly from ProtonMail. I shouldn't be required to load Play and Google Services on my phone, or use some other more sketchy or hacky method with large potential security flaw just to load the APK. Just let us download from the ProtonMail site with a secure login as an option.
2. It would be nice if the app had an option to poll the email server at a reasonable interval (5min-10min). I get that Protonmail developers might see GPS - at the moment, anyway - as the most secure option for push notifications. But GPS opens up a lot of other vulnerabilities on our phones. Polling ProtonMail servers directly for notification is a far more secure option. I'm guessing that many that bother to use ProtonMail as their primary email would be OK trading the additional battery & data usage for security.
Anonymous supported this idea ·
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725 votes
Anonymous supported this idea ·
Several privacy/security conscious Android options do not use Google Play Services. This is by design, as GPS is seen as a backdoor for Google to our data. The market for such phones is likely the same people who left Gmail for ProtonMail to begin with.
The default option for email on these phones is usually IMAP, either through polling or P-IMAP notification. Polling seems to work quite well here, and, if the poll time is properly adjusted, the battery hit is minimal.
It would be helpful if the ProtonMail Android App had some set of options, like IMAP, that allow for notifications without Google Services. This doesn't necessarily have to be a default feature, just a way to get notifications without opening ourselves up to Google.