The 'many ends' are really needed to make E2E viable IMO. It's the #1 reason I rarely use the secret chats in Telegram. And if a security feature has so many d

The 'many ends' are really needed to make E2E viable IMO. It's the #1 reason I rarely use the secret chats in Telegram. And if a security feature has so many drawbacks that nobody uses it, you end up with less security. I'd rather have a flawed E2E implementation than one that is not used at all. For example I recently sent passwords to our Makerspace users in secret chats but half of them didn't see them because they were either on another device or they weren't online (also seems to be a requirement for secret chats). So many of them asked to 'stop being difficult' and send them in a normal chat. This is what I mean. And those people are mostly geeks. If they give up on it, what will normal people do? If it's not seamless enough, only us crypto geeks will use it and the rest will roll their eyes. It has to work for grandma just as easy as it does for us. And Signal and WhatsApp do really pull that off. I agree that backups were WhatsApp's weak spot but they are making some good modifications that allow users to store the key themselves. It would help if the key management could be checked though.. I totally agree with you there. Right now it's not transparent enough, even for those of us who know what they're doing it's not really possible to check with WhatsApp. Signal is another story as it's open source.