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This was entirely predictable and inevitable. I don't understand what Durov thought would happen nor why he rejects E2EE as a liberating technology.

Policy will never be the key to digital privacy, it must always be accompanied by cryptography. The status quo of allowing a third party read and store your messages forever, slurping up all the metadata along the way, is insane.

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I think it is pretty obvious why Durov did not opt for universal E2EE. His main purpose of making Telegram was to make the chat app that is the most usable of all. E2EE comes with a cost on user experience which was for him too high.

Example: Signal can't handle more than one phone logged in, and if for some case you don't open the desktop app for more than 30 days, it logs you out there and you can never get these messages to the desktop.

that is a limitation of signal not E2EE for an example see matrix

although E2EE chats do take more computing and storage especially with very large groups

Indeed this is. For some reason, all the implementations that I can recall suffer from some usability problems. I expect that if a solution that is acceptable for Durov is discovered, they will roll it out. Of course, my prediction might be wrong.

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