New Delhi: Woven into a push for ‘Swadeshi goods’, Chennai-based tech company Zoho has been witnessing a wave of success—the latest being Arratai, a messaging platform being marketed as an alternative to WhatsApp. The Meta-owned messaging app, WhatsApp, massively penetrated the Indian market. Last year, around 853.8 million people used it in the country.
Initially launched in 2021, Arratai has seen an upward swing over the last few days, with seven million downloads in seven days. This comes a month ahead of its “major update”, which was due to be marketed extensively.
“We have done some speed improvements to the Arattai app, please update from Play Store,” Vembu said on X. “We are also scaling the infrastructure rapidly and yesterday added over two million new users.” Vembu added that the number of users rose from 3,000 to 3,50,000 in three days.
Zoho appears to be getting patronage at the highest level. Home Minister Amit Shah announced that he is switching to Zoho Mail. “I have switched to Zoho Mail. Kindly note the change in my email address,” he said in a post on X. Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has also extolled the virtues of Zoho, lauding Zoho Suite, a Microsoft Office equivalent.
The Ministry of Education has also turned to Zoho. Now, Arratai, which is the Tamil word for chat, is having its moment in the sun. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan took to X two weeks ago to urge “everyone to switch to India-made apps for staying connected with friends and family.” The tweet ends with a download link.
‘Upping the game’
In response to the practically overnight surge of Zoho users, founder Sridhar Vembu has announced that he will be “upping his game when it comes to the app’s features”.
“Zoho Cliq, from which Arattai started, keeps data in cloud storage because business users and admins need search, filtering, archiving, integration and other functions,” said Vembu on X. “We are actually turning off that cloud storage in Arattai to offer end-to-end encrypted chat. That is in testing right now.”
According to a report in Money Control, Zoho currently only has end-to-end encryption on calls. Zoho and WhatsApp share several overlapping features. Zoho has Pocket, which allows users to save and share images with oneself, akin to WhatsApp’s chat with yourself. Arratai also boasts of a meetings feature, where group calls can take place.
Again, this is not dissimilar from the function offered by Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. While Meta-owned WhatsApp is AI-integrated, where users can interact with an AI chatbot directly, Zoho currently lags in that arena. However, there is also an argument in favour of this as it supposedly makes the user experience cleaner and less cluttered.
The Zoho team has also built an AI model called Zia. But currently, there appear to be no concrete plans for integration.
“With Zia, we have already built strong AI capabilities within our business apps,” Vembu said. “We will bring in whatever is contextual and useful for Arattai users.”
But what Vembu is also looking for is the assurance of data privacy. Digital citizens have long been wary of the perils of messaging apps and social media, where their data becomes a free-for-all for AI model consumption. According to Vembu, Zia operates “entirely within its own private cloud infrastructure, ensuring that all user data remains secure and is not used for external model training.”
(Edited by Saptak Datta)