Many in the crypto and privacy community mistakenly trust Telegram because it’s “end to end encrypted”, but there are huge issues including not hiding the metadata, censorship, centralization, and phone numbers.
Send this video to your friend that asks why you won’t join:
https://video.simplifiedprivacy.com/why-telegram-sucks/
You can sure it’s end to end encrypted because the client can be analyzed to verify that claim.
Have fun analyzing obfuscated Java code and native binary code.