I didn’t find anything weird in their privacy policy, but anyway, their message is contradictory. They said in the About Us page:

We fight for policy victories that make the biggest difference for the people who are most affected.

And yeah, you can implement Do Not Track and whatever, but what happen to people who don’t know it? In my country most people doesn’t even care about their digital privacy. We are not under CCPA or GDPR protection, I think if you know how nowadays works, you must know the privacy problem is not just DNT, and if you are using Google services you are necessarily giving money to them. I don’t know, i feel their message like the contradiction of Startpage, who built a search engine that protect your privacy but paying it to google…

Idk, i’ve never used apple products, but it could be related to 1. they are not going to use a browser developed by their competitors, Google in the cellphone market and Bing (Microsoft) in the computers one; and 2. their recent interest to respect privacy on their devices? That’s the things come up to my mind.

I thought the same. I send them an email asking for their google preference. If they answer me, I would let you know what they said! But they are already contradictory

I’m agree with you. The real reason is undercovered but it’s easy to perceive some kind of tension between Google and Telegram. I saw some discussion in the NekoX update chat group where some people said it was a privacy thing, claming for e2ee and things like that, but with e2ee it would be de-optimization of the telegram cloud and device sync. So i don’t know, i still consider telegram private, and if you are really into digital neutrality you should know there is a difference between privacy and anonymity. They said things like: telegram is crap and wants to fuck us because it hasn’t have options to log in without a phone number, but it would be certainly impractical.