New Delhi: Zoho’s messaging app Arattai has gone from a quiet side project to one of India’s most-talked-about apps almost overnight. The sudden buzz got a high-profile push when industrialist Anand Mahindra publicly said he’d “downloaded Arattai… with pride,” a shoutout that Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu warmly acknowledged while working with his engineers.
Downloaded @Arattai today…
With pride. pic.twitter.com/99hp3C0COM
— anand mahindra (@anandmahindra) October 4, 2025
What’s actually happening:
Arattai, whose name means “chat” in Tamil and which Zoho first rolled out in 2021, climbed app-store charts as users looked for a “made-in-India, spyware-free” alternative to global messengers. The app offers familiar features people expect from modern chat services: one-to-one and group chats, voice notes, media sharing, audio/video calls, multi-device support (including desktop and Android TV) and things like stories and channels for broadcasts. But rapid growth has also exposed early teething problems, users reported OTP delays, slow contact sync and call glitches as servers struggled under load. Zoho says fixes are in progress and that some core features, such as end-to-end encryption for chats, are still being worked on.
Numbers and momentum: The app crossed millions of downloads very quickly after the wave of encouragement from ministers, entrepreneurs and social-media chatter, Deccan Herald reported the figure at about 7.5 million downloads (across all platforms including Playstore and Apple app store) during the early surge. That kind of early traction is impressive, but it’s not the whole story.
India Today’s technology commentary gives a useful reality check: India has a long list of homegrown apps that created buzz but failed to hold users long term, Hike and Koo among them. The column points to three recurring problems: losing simplicity by piling on features, rushing to monetize (which makes the product intrusive), and failing to build trust around privacy and data protection. In Arattai’s case, the absence of default end-to-end encryption, at least initially, is singled out as a visceral example of that trust gap.
A practical view:
Hype and national pride can bring users to a platform’s door, but they don’t keep them there. What converts curious early adopters into long-term users is product discipline: keep the core experience fast, reliable and simple; delay aggressive monetization until the user base stabilizes, and make privacy concrete, not just a slogan. For Arattai, the priority must be to stabilize core features (calls, OTPs, sync), ship strong end-to-end encryption, and communicate transparently about data practices. That combination builds the kind of trust that money and PR can’t buy.
Arattai’s USP:
If Arattai succeeds sustainably, it could teach other Indian startups a valuable lesson, scale responsibly and protect user trust first. Later the government can help by backing clear, enforceable privacy rules, but companies must also choose to design with privacy and simplicity at their center, even when short-term pressures to monetize loom large.
