Yen also said that despite Apple’s claims to be a privacy focused company, its App Store policies do not help privacy focused apps and services. ProtonMail is now one of the founding members of Coalition for App Fairness. To ensure that the company could continue earning from its iOS user base, they had to raise their price by 26% as 30% of the profits from the iOS app were going to Apple. Apple even restricted the company’s ability to push out any sort of updates in the App Store, until the change was implemented. All ProtonMail was told that they had to implement in-app purchases in their app if they wanted to stay in the App Store. There was no fair discussion between the startup and Apple.

So ProtonMail decided to raise the cost of its entire service on iOS by roughly 26 percent to satisfy Apple’s needs, eating the rest itself. Yen tells me there was a month-long period where ProtonMail couldn’t update its app at all, even for security reasons, and Apple was threatening to remove the app if his company continued to delay.

ProtonMail CEO Andy Yen told The Verge that Apple applied ‘mafia’ like tactics afterwards:

Proton email cost