In the last 3 days, the Arattai application which is a local alternative for WhatsApp, has seen a huge spike in the number of users signing up. The number increased from 3000 to 350k in the last few days, and Zoho was not ready for this. There have been discussions around data privacy and security for the last few days, and many people are switching to Indian based applications with enhanced security and to promote Make in India.
The sudden spike is after India's Union Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, publicly called out Arattai as the best made in India product for messaging and it is a potential WhatsApp killer. In many countries, WhatsApp is not the number one messaging application. In many countries, people use different applications. Not just the Union Minister but many people had talked about Arattai being the best alternative and this has increased the traffic to this application which was not expected.
Arattai is not a new application. I have tried using it in the past just for a few days when there was a similar popularity back then. It was launched in 2021 by Zoho as an experimental project. But today a demand is getting created slowly. Especially after the recent marketing campaigns the popularity is growing rapidly. Most of the features that are already present in WhatsApp is also available on Arattai. I tried logging in and creating an account back then, but since there were no users, I uninstalled it. But now after hearing this news, it makes me curious, and I feel like trying it once again.
I'm not a very social person anyway, so, I don't fall for this fancy thing anyways but I'm glad that a product from India is getting a good recognition and good to have a make in India product. From the looks of it, the application is not having all the protections yet as end to end encryption is currently available only for calls but not for regular chat messages and maybe it will be completed soon.
The co-founder and Chief Scientist, Sridhar Vembu, has mentioned that the application is facing some issues because of the sudden high demand and traffic, and they are currently working very hard on upgrading the servers. Hopefully, the server issues will be sorted soon and it will be good if Zoho products become a good alternative for some of the existing applications. Though people call it WhatsApp killer, I think it can take a lot of time to replace things that people are used to.
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