As well as email and VPN services, Swiss company Proton also offers cloud storage. Think Google Drive, but end-to-end encrypted. The macOS app for Proton Drive has been around since 2023 but today, a 2.0 version has been released, rebuilding the app from the ground up.
The app lives in your desktop menu bar, allowing you to access files and open up your Drive in browser with just a few clicks. The dropdown box also shows you the status and activity on your most recent files, so you can see when changes are syncing and when things go wrong. Upload and download speeds are also improved compared to the old app, giving users up to double the speed.
If you want to create and share an encrypted document with your friends, Proton Drive can do that too. If you click “View Online” in the app and select the “+ New” button in the top left corner, you’ll create a brand new Proton Docs file. This is pretty much like Google Docs, but again, it’s end-to-end encrypted.
The text editor is a lot more lightweight than Google Docs but you can still collaborate in real-time with other people, make suggestions, leave comments, or share view-only links. There will still be a lot of times when you have to choose Google Docs over Proton just because it’s what the whole world uses — but if you’d at least like your personal files and documents to receive the encrypted treatment, Proton Drive has you covered.
You can also download files and folders to your device if you want to have access to them offline. If you’re not on macOS, Proton Drive has a Windows app as well and the company will soon be releasing the Software Development Kit (SDK) the macOS app is based on, which will allow the open-source community to create a Linux version of the app as well.
