Arattai, the homegrown messaging platform from Zoho, is set for a major upgrade that will bring end-to-end encryption across its entire ecosystem — addressing one of its key shortcomings in competing with privacy-focused global rivals like WhatsApp.
Zoho co-founder and chief scientist Sridhar Vembu on Saturday announced that the Arattai team had opted for a full rollout of compulsory encryption, beginning with one-to-one chats and expanding to group conversations soon after.
“We had to do some redesign around it and we wanted extensive testing because it is a drastic change. It is now being tested by about 6,000 people in the company,” he said in a post on X. He added that the team had identified issues, fixed them, and is conducting “one more round of testing on a new build that has fixed the issues identified.”
“If all goes well, we plan to deploy in a few days. It will be a forced upgrade on all because it is a drastic change,” he said.
According to Vembu, existing Arattai users can already download the app version that carries the code for mandatory end-to-end encryption, though it will not function until the feature is enabled by the company after final testing. “The app is also faster and sleeker now which you can experience,” he said.
The announcement comes as Arattai has slipped in rankings on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, after initial nationalistic buzz and government endorsements had pushed downloads sharply higher. At one point, Arattai’s daily sign-ups had jumped from 3,000 to 350,000 in just three days, prompting Zoho to expand backend infrastructure.
However, the absence of end-to-end encryption and networking effect led to slowdown in adoption, with Arattai dropping out of the top 100 apps on both app stores in recent times.
In a recent interview with ANI, Vembu said the decline in rankings was part of a normal growth cycle. “There’s nothing going wrong. I think, first of all, the idea that something went wrong is what is wrong. It is a normal course of events. Nothing goes straight to the moon. You have to go through these ups and downs,” he said.