Pathways to a Just Digital Future Watch this tech inequality series featuring scholars, practitioners, & activistsįollowing Apple’s 2018 demand for ProtonMail to add IAPs, the company had to give Apple a 30% commission of each subscription through the App Store. For Yen, “he idea that to have an online existence, you have to sell your most intimate and sensitive and private information to tech giants, is fundamentally wrong and also morally incorrect.” Yen’s vision for ProtonMail was to create an entire “privacy ecosystem” of services to rival the dominant players: Google, Apple and Facebook. While each of these services could be accessed for free, there were various limitations for non-paying users (e.g., only 1GB storage and 150 emails per day for ProtonMail). The company had since launched Proton Calendar, Proton Drive (file sharing and cloud storage) and Proton VPN. In 2016, the company moved to a freemium business model. ProtonMail began as an invitation-only public beta in 2014, raising over $500,000 through a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. Said Yen: “They are judge, jury, and executioner on their platform, and you can take it or leave it… There’s nothing you can say to that.”

But Apple had stumbled upon a notice in the ProtonMail app that advertised ProtonMail’s paid web app service, which it argued breached Apple’s policies mandating that “the sale of digital goods and services within an app must use In-App Purchase.” Rather than fight, Yen decided to immediately comply. For the last 2 years, ProtonMail had offered a premium paid email service through its web app, though it did not offer any of the paid service functionalities in its iPhone app. It warned Yen that his company’s encrypted email service app was in breach of Apple’s rules and that it would have to add “In App Purchases” (IAPs) in order to remain on the App Store. In early 2018, ProtonMail CEO Andy Yen received an ominous email from Apple’s App Store compliance team.

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