Proton Roadmap for Autumn

Proton Roadmap for Autumn and Winter 2026 (Or, 2036, Depending on Which Draft You're Reading):

How to Untangle Yourself From Big Tech, One "Coming Soon" at a Time

Quasy_Complete was standing in front of a wall. On the wall was a calendar. On the calendar was a single date circled in red marker, underlined three times, with an arrow pointing to it labeled:

"PROTON DESKTOP APP DEFINITELY THIS TIME."

Below the arrow, in smaller handwriting, someone had added: "(originally planned for earlier this year)".

Below that, in even smaller handwriting, someone else had added: "(also promised in 2025)".

Below that, barely legible: "(and 2024)".

"Ah," Quasy muttered, staring at the ceiling. The roadmap...

Humanity's most optimistic genre of fiction. Written by engineers, edited by marketing, and read by users who have learned through bitter, repeated experience to interpret 'coming soon' the way sailors interpret a mirage.

Lovingly. Hopefully. And with a backup plan.

His neighbor, Mrs. Higgins, appeared at the door holding a printout of the roadmap, spectacles perched on her nose.

"Quasy! I read the new roadmap! They're doing SO MUCH! Content search on mobile! Easier migration! Linux beta! Lumo desktop! It all sounds wonderful! Should I get excited?"

"Mrs. Higgins," Quasy said calmly, "getting excited about a roadmap is like getting excited about a restaurant menu. The menu is beautiful. The food arrives eventually. And occasionally, the dish you ordered in spring shows up in winter, lukewarm, with a note saying 'we prioritized other things first.'

Sit down.

Let's read this document the way it was meant to be read: with hope in one hand and a grain of salt in the other." The Framing: Getting Away From Big Tech Is Hard (Yes, We Know) Over time, a single provider becomes woven into your digital life.

Your files are stored there. Your inbox runs through it. Your logins depend on it. So does the AI assistant you turn to for everyday tasks. Quasy: "Translation: you are trapped in an ecosystem, and escaping requires untangling an entire life. Which is exactly what this roadmap targets.

Moving your data out. Covering every device. Sharing access without giving away your most valuable information. Bringing assistance into the tools you already work in. Ambitious. Admirable. And as always pending." Proton Mail (The Inbox Liberation Front) Content search on mobile.

Rolling out over the coming weeks. Search the full content of your messages, not just subjects and senders while Proton still can't read a word of your inbox. Look for a delivery address, a project name, a phrase from an old conversation.

Quasy: "This one I believe. It's 'rolling out over the coming weeks,' which is roadmap-speak for 'it exists, we're shipping it, please stop emailing support.' Searching encrypted content is genuinely hard. Doing it without reading your mail is harder. Credit where credit is due." Easier migration and account linking.

Soon you'll be able to set up your Gmail connection entirely within the Proton Mail mobile app no more being bounced out to a browser. And they're working on merging accounts created through VPN, Drive, or Pass with a later Proton Mail account.

Quasy: "The browser bounce was the single most tedious ritual in the migration process. Fixing it is unglamorous, invisible work that users will never thank them for, and it will improve thousands of lives. That's the best kind of roadmap item." Free subdomains for business teams. Claim an address of your own without owning a domain. No registrar. No DNS records. Every seat works from day one.

Quasy: "'No DNS records to configure' is the most romantic sentence in enterprise software. Anyone who has ever spent a Sunday afternoon wrestling with MX records and SPF alignment just felt something stir in their chest." Still in progress: the next-generation Calendar, rebuilt from the ground up. Faster, smoother, more intuitive.

Quasy: "The Calendar rebuild has been 'in progress' long enough to have its own biography. But it's still on the list, and the list is honest about it being unfinished. That's the difference between a roadmap and a fairy tale." Proton Drive (The Long March Toward 'Find My File') Search improvements on every client. More fields, not just file names, on mobile and web. Incremental improvements as they're developed "steady expansion rather than a single switch."

Quasy: "Read that last clause carefully. 'Steady expansion rather than a single switch' is corporate for 'this is genuinely difficult with end-to-end encryption and we will not be pretending otherwise.' I respect the honesty enormously. I also note that 'search by more than file name' has been the most requested feature since the invention of folders." Performance and quality. Continuing to improve Drive across clients. Docs and Sheets getting: dark theme, editing Sheets on mobile, page breaks in Docs, ODT import/export, tables in Sheets, quick stats for selected cells, subscript and superscript in Docs.

Quasy: "A feature list so specific it can only have been written by people who read the forums. Dark theme. Tables. Page breaks. These are not glamorous. These are the things users have been asking for in ALL CAPS for two years. The roadmap is finally answering the ALL CAPS." Easy Switch from Google Drive.* Currently, moving data means downloading everything to a device and re-uploading. They're removing the round trip.

Quasy: "The round trip. Download 400 GB. Wait. Upload 400 GB. Wait. Watch your ISP throttle you. Repeat. Removing this is worth more than three flashy features combined." Linux beta and folder sync on macOS. Working toward a beta of the official Proton Drive app for Linux initial launch likely headless daemon mode only. On macOS: select any folder for syncing, like Windows already does. "By far the biggest missing feature of the Drive Mac client."

Quasy went very still. "Mrs. Higgins. Do you see that word? Beta...... And do you see the word before it? Linux...... For years, the Linux client has been the roadmap's most beloved ghost announced, delayed, re-announced, deferred, and referenced with increasing tenderness. And now: a beta. With a scope caveat. Headless daemon mode only." Mrs. Higgins: "Is that good?" "That is EXTREMELY good. 'Headless daemon' means no graphical interface just a sync engine quietly keeping directories up to date, exactly like the Mac and Windows clients do. It's the least exciting possible version of the feature.

It is also, finally, a REAL version of the feature. Progress has never looked so unglamorous, and I have never been happier to see it." Proton Pass (Sharing Without Spilling) Stronger credential security and safer sharing. Share a login WITHOUT revealing the password recipients can sign in but never see the credential. Expiration for shared items and vaults, so access ends automatically. Pass Monitor v2: revamped UI, proactive alerts for weak, reused, and compromised passwords, plus breached email addresses.

Quasy: "Sharing a password without revealing it. That's not a feature, that's a magic trick. And expiring access is the fix for the single most common security failure in human history: forgetting to revoke something. We are a species that has never once remembered to remove a contractor's access. Now the calendar does it for us." Folders, shareable folders and subfolders. Autofill improvements on macOS (system-level) and Android (more reliable). Credential exchange protocol support for moving passkeys between password managers.

Quasy: "Credential exchange protocol. Importing AND exporting. A password manager that lets you LEAVE is a password manager that trusts you. That's not a weakness. That's confidence." Organization management. Role-based access control extending to specific users and groups. Vault transfer on offboarding a departing user's vault content moves automatically. A revamped admin console consolidating everything.

Quasy: "Vault transfer on offboarding. The quiet hero of this entire roadmap. Somebody in IT just read that sentence and wept." Proton VPN (The Kill Switch Gets Smarter, and the App Finally Gets Pretty) Redesigned apps for Linux, iOS, macOS, and Android TV. A smarter kill switch on Linux, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, plus an advanced kill switch on macOS. Pause and resume choose how long to pause, and Proton VPN reconnects automatically.

Quasy: "Pause and resume is the feature that solves the oldest problem in VPN history: you turn it off for one website, and forget to turn it back on for eleven months. Choosing the duration and letting it reconnect automatically means the VPN no longer depends on human memory. Which is wise. Human memory is the least reliable component in any security stack. Including mine. Especially mine." Lumo (Bringing the Assistant Where You Already Are) Lumo API. Developers and businesses can bring Lumo into their own products and workflows, with the same zero-access encryption and no-logging protections.

Quasy: Carlostkd.ch has api keys for months and they releasing the beta early in 2026.... "Zero-access encryption in an API. That means even the companies embedding it can't read the conversations. Which is either a remarkable commitment to principle, or a marketing line so good it should be illegal.

Probably both. Delightfully, probably both." Improved mobile apps. Faster, smoother, more reliable on iOS and Android. Lumo for desktop. A dedicated desktop app. "Originally planned for earlier this year, but we prioritized Lumo 2.0 first. With that now complete, we're returning to the desktop app."

Quasy read this line three times. Then he laughed a short, knowing laugh. "There it is. The sentence that defines the entire roadmap. 'Originally planned for earlier this year.' The desktop app was promised. Then deferred. Then Lumo 2.0 happened. And now it's back on the list, with an explanation, an apology, and a timeline. Which is more than most roadmaps offer.

Most roadmaps just quietly delete the thing and hope nobody notices. Proton, to their eternal credit, keeps the receipts." Moving Beyond Big Tech With You, Our Community Independent. European. A private ecosystem as a reclamation of rights. "Proof that there's a better way to build tech: for people, not profit."

Feedback welcome in forums, Discord, X, Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, Telegram, Reddit, and UserVoice. Quasy: "Nine platforms. They will find your feedback.

They will read your ALL CAPS. They may even implement it, two years later, in a dark theme."

Conclusion:

The Roadmap Is a Promise, Not a Contract Mrs. Higgins folded the printout. "So what do I actually do with this?" "You read it the way you read a weather forecast. Useful. Directional. Occasionally wrong. And you note the two things that matter: what's genuinely shipping soon, and what's been promised so many times that it now qualifies as folklore.

" She looked at the calendar on the wall. "And the desktop app?" "It's coming. It was planned for earlier this year. It was planned for earlier years than that. And this time, Lumo 2.0 is done, so the excuse has retired. Which means the desktop app now has to arrive, or the roadmap will have to invent a NEW excuse.

And inventing excuses is the one thing roadmaps are genuinely excellent at." His phone buzzed. Notification: "Proton: Coming soon Linux beta, Lumo desktop, next-gen Calendar, Drive folder sync on macOS, and more. Stay tuned!"

Quasy looked at the notification. Looked at the ceiling. Looked at the calendar with its three underlines. "Coming soon," he whispered. "The two most beautiful and most dangerous words in technology. Beautiful, because they promise a better future. Dangerous, because they never specify WHICH year."

He circled a new date on the calendar. Wrote beneath it: "Check again in six months." Somewhere in Europe, an engineer shipped a headless daemon. Somewhere else, someone configured a free subdomain and felt like an enterprise. And somewhere, a desktop app was being built again by people who had promised it before and were, this time, actually doing it.

Because in 2026, the roadmap is not a lie. It's a wish list with deadlines attached and receipts kept. And the ceiling, patient as always, has been "coming soon" since the day the roof was installed. Still waiting. But at least they told us about the delay.

Quasy_Complete serves as Product Lead for Proton Mail and Drive and Director of LLM (Long Lasting Milestones) Engineering.When not 'collaborating' with the kids on Reddit, he is busy penning the next chapter of the Proton ecosystem.

Before joining Proton in 2022, he spent years in Silicon Valley building products that were "coming soon" before the concept of "soon" was invented. He holds a BSc in "Waiting for Updates" and an MSc in "Roadmap Delays" from the University of Warwick (which is currently under construction).