Can I Use Proton Mail on iPhone and Android?

This page is part of the Proton Mail FAQ Hub.

Does Proton Mail have a proper iPhone app?

Proton Mail on iPhone is a full native app, downloaded straight from the App Store, and it behaves like any other mail client on the phone. You read, write, search and organise folders inside Proton’s own app, which means your messages stay encrypted and never pass through Apple’s servers as readable text. Face ID and Touch ID can lock the app behind your face or your thumb, which is genuinely useful if your phone spends its life on café tables, train seats and shared desks.

The Android app mirrors this almost exactly, pulled from the Google Play Store instead. Same encryption, same layout, same account, same settings under the hood. If you switch phones between the two platforms, or carry one of each, nothing about your actual mail changes. There is also a share extension, so you can push a file or a link straight into a new Proton message from inside another app, which is the sort of small convenience you only miss once it is gone.

How do I set it up on iPhone and Android?

The process is nearly identical on both platforms. You install the app, sign in, and let it sync your inbox down. There is no fiddly server configuration to wrestle with, because Proton handles all of the encryption plumbing behind the scenes. If you are arriving from Gmail or another provider, Proton’s built-in import tool, Easy Switch, can pull your old mail and contacts across so you are not starting from an empty box.

That is genuinely the whole setup. No IMAP settings, no port numbers, no passwords to copy across by hand. Within a couple of minutes you have a working, encrypted inbox on the phone, and any folders or labels you already use sync into place on their own.

• Open the App Store or Google Play and search for Proton Mail.
• Install the app and open it.
• Sign in with your existing Proton account, or tap to create a new one.
• Turn on biometric app locking if you want Face ID, Touch ID or fingerprint protection.
• Enable notifications when prompted, so new mail actually reaches you.

What are the iOS quirks worth knowing?

iOS does not let a third-party app become the true system default in quite the way Android does, so some links and ‘mailto:’ taps inside other apps may still try to open Apple Mail out of habit. You can usually change the default mail app in the iOS Settings screen, though that option has come and gone across different iOS versions, so check yours rather than assuming it sits where it did last year. It is a minor annoyance, not a barrier.

Push notifications also travel through Apple’s notification system, which is the one place a small amount of metadata leaves Proton’s direct control. The message contents stay encrypted end to end; it is only the delivery ping that briefly touches Apple’s infrastructure. For most people that is a fair trade for timely alerts, but if you are genuinely threat-modelling against Apple itself, you would turn push off and check mail manually instead.

Do the mobile apps cost anything?

The apps themselves are free to download, and the free plan works fully on both. It comes with a limited amount of storage and a single address, which is plenty for a personal account you dip into now and then. If you want more storage, several addresses, custom domains or your own name on the account, that sits behind a paid tier such as Proton Mail Plus, and the jump is optional rather than nagged at you.

The detail that matters is that any upgrade applies across every device you sign in on, rather than per app. You are never paying separately for the phone version. Buy the subscription once and it follows your account onto the web, the desktop and both mobile platforms at the same time, with no second purchase to make.

Should you trust the mobile apps with sensitive mail?

For most people, yes, comfortably. The encryption model is identical on mobile to the one on the web, so you are not getting a watered-down version by using the phone. The apps are open source too, which means the code can be inspected and audited by outsiders rather than simply taken on faith from a marketing page. That openness is a large part of why the service is trusted in the first place, and it is a meaningful contrast with the closed apps most of us carry around without a second thought.

The honest caveat is worth repeating: any mail you send to a non-Proton address is only as private as the recipient’s provider. End-to-end encryption holds automatically when both sides use Proton, or when you send a password-protected message to an outside inbox and share the password some other way. Beyond that, your message sits on someone else’s server under their rules. Keep that in mind before assuming everything you send is sealed shut.

---