I know this has been talked to death, but after seeing the recent Proton Ask Me Anything comments about contacts and contact sync finally sitting on the 2027 roadmap, I wanted to bring up the standalone app debate. The team mentioned they haven't decided if it will be a dedicated app or just a shared module inside existing apps.
Please, please make it a standalone app.
Here is the underlying issue: native OS contacts are a privacy nightmare. Whether you are on iOS or Android, your cloud-synced contacts are not end-to-end encrypted. Even if you use Apple's Advanced Data Protection, they specifically exclude contacts because of legacy CardDAV support. Plus, if you leave everything in the native phone address book, every random app you install begs for full access to harvest your social graph.
Right now, using Proton Contacts inside the Mail app is just too cluttered. Because there is no dedicated space, my actual real-life phone numbers get mixed together with every single random email address I have ever replied to. It makes managing a true phonebook impossible.
Having a dedicated, FOSS, E2EE Proton Contacts app that acts as a secure vault isolated from the OS would be incredible. It would let us finally delete people from iCloud or Google and keep them safe. A simple background sync tool that just dumps everything back into the unencrypted Apple/Google address book completely defeats the purpose of sandboxing the data in the first place.
Does anyone know if the team is leaning one way or the other yet? And for everyone else waiting on this, do you prefer a standalone app or just better integration with the native OS?