The Arattai messenger has been pitched as India’s homegrown alternative to Meta’s WhatsApp, and Zoho has consistently worked on its feature set to make it a viable chat platform. While the introduction of E2E encryption enhanced the security aspect, Zoho had committed to adding more features to encourage users to switch. Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu has now shared an update on Arattai’s latest status.
Vembu, who is the Chief Scientist at Zoho, announced that the team has been “obsessing” over the feature to deliver a version they are truly proud of.
In a post on X, Vembu shared the Arattai team’s focus on refining the app’s core experience. “Arattai search just got much better! We obsessed about it, and finally, we have something we are proud of,” he wrote.
Vembu revealed how Arattai is receiving consistent enhancements, with updates rolling out every week. The team recently rolled out an enhanced search feature within the app to let users quickly look for contacts, groups, messages and files.
Vembu confirms consistent updates on Arattai
However, Vembu took the opportunity to give a glimpse of an upcoming Arattai feature that many of its users had requested for — end-to-end encryption for group chats. Vembu confirmed that the E2E is actively in development for group chats.
“The one major item pending is group chat e2e encryption (personal chats are already e2e encrypted). We are working on it — it requires a fair bit of work,” he explained. Vembu also revealed that the intense effort to perfect Arattai is yielding broader benefits across the company’s entire product portfolio.
“We are learning so much from perfecting Arattai that all our products will benefit from this knowledge,” Vembu stated.
Perfecting the product first, then marketing: Vembu
Responding to user questions about Arattai’s adoption strategy, Vembu shared a long-term approach to embed Arattai as a viable alternative to Meta’s WhatsApp.
“First, we are perfecting the product, obsessing about details like voice quality in poor network conditions and so on. Second, we have integrations coming. Finally, we will do more marketing once we are satisfied with 1 and 2,” he replied to a user concerned about network effects.
With Arattai, Zoho aims to address growing concerns around data privacy and foreign app dominance, especially in the wake of India encouraging sovereign AI and app development. Some of the key features in Arattai include end-to-end encrypted direct messages and voice/video calls, text and voice messaging, high-quality audio and video calls, large group chats supporting up to 1,000 participants, dedicated channels for communities, and Stories for sharing moments.
Where Arattai differs from WhatsApp are two unique features:
– A built-in Meetings feature for scheduling and hosting video conferences similar to Zoom or Google Meet directly within the app.
– A private Pocket for saving notes, images, videos, and reminders as personal cloud storage.
Arattai also allows media and document sharing, live location sharing, mentions (similar to Slack), and multi-device support. The messenger also promises an ad-free experience with user data stored in Indian data centers. Zoho claims that the app is optimised for low-end devices and slow networks.