But not for photos, arguably one of the more important things to a lot of people to be E2EE, and not everyone wants to host their own Immich instance, or do things manually. iCloud offers E2EE photo back up and sync and native apps for it, it's a huge selling point that Google could just as easily offer but willingly choose not to.

> it's a huge selling point that Google could just as easily offer but willingly choose not to.

Google Photos is meant for sharing, where E2EE makes little sense. You can search your photos from any device.

If you really want to give up that convenience for E2EE, you might as well do it right and use Proton or Ente, which have E2EE for all photos, unlike iCloud, which isn't for shared albums or photos shared to anyone with the link. Unlike iOS, Android lets these apps have access to all the same device APIs as Google Photos, meaning they're as seamlessly integrated as possible. Apple iCloud uses iOS APIs not available to third parties, locking you in to using either a gimpy service or a gimpy app.

You can share and search[1] for your photos from any device on Ente as well, with E2EE.

[1]: https://ente.io/ml