[jek0]

AFAIK, Telegram's private conversations are encrypted with private keys stored on device _only_ (not on the server). At least it's what they claim. If true, government requests for data stored on servers are probably not enough.

[newscracker]

The secret chats are indeed end to end encrypted, but they have some important exclusions and limitations:

* Group chats can only use the default encryption, not end to end encryption.

* The end to end encrypted chats are tied to a single device, and there's no sync across devices (in contrast, all chats on Wire are end to end encrypted and sync across devices within a limited time period).

The default use cases of almost all users has the chat messages stored in plain text on the Telegram servers. This is one of the reasons search (done on the server side) is quite fast on Telegram.

P.S.: Despite these limitations, I prefer Telegram for its superior UX and for not having metadata shared with Facebook. My wish is that someday Telegram makes E2E the default everywhere.