Proton Calendar finally accessible to everyone worldwide

Everyone using an iPhone can now protect all their day-to-day schedule with the latest improvement of the popular secure email app Proton Mail. Launched roughly a year ago, the encrypted Proton Calendar is now finally available on iOS devices too. 

The Swiss-based provider, also behind one of the best VPN services, Proton VPN, claims that today's announcement is one of its biggest releases as most of its community engages on Apple devices.  

Like its other products, Proton Calendar is free to use. People looking for more functionality or additional storage can then subscribe to either its Plus or Unlimited plan instead. 

A fully fledged privacy ecosystem 

“People don't think about calendars as something to protect, but a calendar is a record of your life,” Proton CEO Andy Yen told TechRadar. “We shouldn't give that information away as it will simply be misused either by governments or by the tech giants.”  

The vision is simple. Like Google users, people signed up for Proton Mail are very likely to integrate additional features like the two-month old Proton Drive and the encrypted calendar in their everyday activities.

Proton Calendar is believed to actually be the first application of its kind. 

“At this point, almost anybody in the world can use Calendar. That's pretty huge because it's simply the first time it actually exists,” said Yen. 

“It helps make that ecosystem complete, and this also goes in the direction of the performance heading in the future. Proton is really becoming a full-fledged ecosystem.”  

Building the software wasn't easy, though. 

Yen explained that Calendar was actually the most technically challenging product as preserving the end-to-end encryption under sharing conditions was a pretty complex feature to achieve. 

Now, any user will be able to enjoy the protection on basically all the details of each created event. These include names, locations and participants. 

For technical reasons, the time of the event is the only piece of information not to be encrypted. 

What's more, the hard work that the Proton team put into this is already showing results. Its newly launched Proton Drive has seen over 1,000,000 files uploaded per day in less than two months. The software has also been used to circulate videos during the recent protests in China as a way to get around censorship.

“A lot of our users are activists, journalists and dissidents. We're very active in places like Hong Kong, Russia and Iran. All of this is a big part of our mission. As a scientist, this is the reason why we created Proton in the first place,” he said.

Yen believes that even Calendar has the potential to revolutionize how activists and human right organizations operate, especially across authoritarian countries.   

“I think that Calendar just gives an additional tool to make their information protected so that they can avoid prosecution and all the other things that come with having data leaks in those countries.”

Being able to deliver the right impact that could make a difference in people's life is then the main reason why all Proton products, including Proton VPN, come free of charge. 

“This is particularly important in countries like Iran and Russia because they are under sanctions so credit cards don't work, bank payments don't work, there's no PayPal. In fact our millions of users in these countries, even if they wanted to pay us, there's no way for them to actually transfer money,” said Yen. “Having a free service is the only way to really address those users.” 

While an encrypted competitor to Google Meets isn't Proton's first priority right now, we shouldn't be waiting too long to see its functionality grow – and for those in need of a genuinely secure alternative, this will be invaluable.