Friday, August 1, 2025

Proton Pass and Proton Authenticator

Romain Dillet (2023, Hacker News):

Proton, the Geneva, Switzerland-based company behind the end-to-end encrypted email service Proton Mail, as well as Proton VPN, Proton Drive and Proton Calendar, is announcing a brand new product today. And it’s a password manager called Proton Pass.

Like other Proton products, the company is insisting on the privacy and security features of this new password manager. Everything you store in Proton Pass is end-to-end encrypted, including passwords (obviously), email addresses, URLs and notes.

Son Nguyen Kim (2024, MacRumors):

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of the Proton Pass macOS app and the Proton Pass Linux app. One of the most popular requests from the Proton community was a standalone desktop app, which is now available on every major platform — Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS and iPadOS, and Chrome OS (via our Android app).

As a companion to the Proton Pass macOS app, we’re also pleased to announce the standalone native Safari browser extension. This extension offers enhanced convenience and security for everyone that uses macOS’s default browser. Unlike Safari’s default password manager, Proton Pass allows you to sync your logins across multiple different browsers and devices, ensuring consistent access across all platforms.

Son Nguyen Kim (MacRumors, TidBITS-Talk, Hacker News):

Today we’re introducing Proton Authenticator, a free 2FA app that gives you more flexibility than other authenticators, along with strong encryption from a trusted team. Proton Authenticator is open source like all our apps, available for every device (including desktop!), and lets you import all your existing 2FA tokens in seconds.

Proton Authenticator is available now for free on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and Linux.

The App Store description says:

Effortless Import: Migrate from Google Authenticator, Authy, or any other app in seconds.

But this doesn’t seem to include Apple Passwords or 1Password.

Last year, Proton also introduced their own version of Google Docs, with a notes app forthcoming. So they seem to be doing the opposite of Dropbox.

Previously:

Update (2025-08-08): Adam Engst:

However, for Authy and Microsoft Authenticator, Proton Authenticator just indicates that they don’t offer export options, so there’s no way to import from them. Why include them in the interface when there’s no chance they could work?

Missing from the import list are 1Password and Apple’s Passwords. 1Password seems like an understandable omission, since I see no way of extracting the two-factor authentication seed. However, Apple’s Passwords does allow copying of a setup URL that contains a secret attribute you can paste in when manually creating a Proton Authenticator account.

[…]

When used within the Apple ecosystem, Proton Authenticator lets you sync accounts via iCloud, which is easier than Authy’s separate account. A Proton account is necessary if you want to sync across platforms.

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Is anyone that is serious about password integrity going to use a product like Apple passwords? There's no export feature that I found while briefly testing last year. Compound that with the company's abysmal track record of keeping their platform apps competitive and up-to-date... Setting aside the maxim of not putting all your eggs in one basket. Lastly, why would I trust something as important as passwords to iCloud when Apple repeatedly shows they don't get services? Still no explanation about what a bunch of folks got their Apple accounts reset last year.


So you can sync Proton Authenticator with your Proton account (without using iCloud).
It doesn’t use any “master password”, so it’s only protected with your Proton account login credentials….


I downloaded Proton Authenticator but it doesn’t support importing from Authy. I think the app description on the App Store is for something called Auth, but not Authy. If you try to import into Proton, it’ll list what apps or services it supports and mentions Authy can’t export its data and to ask Authy if they’ll somehow support that in future.

I’ve begun migrating all my Authy codes into Apple Passwords and it works great. But, D Dan mentioned here that there’s been some issue with Apple and resting accounts, so I think I’ll try to use both Apple Paawords and Proton for code generating since Google and a few others allow several authenticator apps to be used, which should hopefully be a good backup measure. That and keeping one-time backup codes.


Briefly looked at this, and there's apparently no self-hosted option. Guess we'll stick to Bitwarden.

>Is anyone that is serious about password integrity going to use a product like Apple passwords? There's no export feature that I found while briefly testing last year.

On macOS, it's File → Export All Passwords to File…, where I would expect it.

On iOS, which still has fewer UI standards than the Mac did in 1984, there's a … menu in the top right, which offers Export Data to Another App.


Authy has no export feature, so it's unreasonable to expect other tools to import from it.

If you already use Proton Pass, then create a new free Proton account for the Authenticator.

I'm pretty sure there is no Notes app forthcoming. Nothing has been announced, and if you have a Proton account, you get a discount on your Standard Notes subscription.


Proton Pass does support import from 1Password, even in 1Password's native format .1pux. I imported my entire 1Password database into it and it brought almost everything succesfully except for files (not sure if those are in the .1pux file or not). So far it feels like a good app on all of the platforms I've run it on, seems very fast, feature-rich and fills in web forms better than 1Password (which surprised me).


@J That’s good to hear about Proton Pass. Proton Authenticator did not offer 1Password for me, and I’m skeptical about the quality on the Mac because there’s no separate Mac app. It’s just the iOS version running on Mac, and they didn’t even bother to tell Apple they verified compatibility for Mac.


"Why include them in the interface when there’s no chance they could work?"

Probably because otherwise, people will keep asking Proton to add support for these apps.

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