Exactly. But back in those days Telegram was WAY ahead of WhatsApp (in terms of features). Nowadays, the ability of logging in onto the webapp without your phone is pretty much the one thing that Telegram does better. I read somewhere (maybe on HN?) that to have end-to-end encryption for some reason it has to work the way WhatsApp does it. I don't know why, but it's consistent with the fact that Telegram does not allow encryption on the webapp. I'm not an expert on this though.