IS TELEGRAM REALLY AN ENCRYPTED MESSAGING APP?

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

Telegram, while technically using encryption, doesn't offer end-to-end encryption by default. Users must manually activate "Secret Chats" for individual conversations, a feature that is difficult to find and use, which means that a vast majority of Telegram conversations are visible to Telegram servers. Furthermore, while end-to-end encryption is valuable for protecting message content, it doesn't address the broader issue of metadata collection.