Swadeshi WhatsApp: With govt backing, Zoho app Arattai downloads skyrocket
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Within a week after Union Minister for Information Technology and Electronics Ashwini Vaishnaw announced on September 24 that he is moving to Indian firm Zoho’s instant messaging app Arattai, and many others followed him to push local goods and services, the downloads of the Swadeshi company’s app has skyrocketed from just 300-odd daily to nearly 1 lakh per day.
Arattai, which in Tamil language means ‘chit-chat’, is being viewed as an Indian rival to WhatsApp and has seen an exponential growth across parameters like installs and usage, and app store rankings, the media reported.
The Centre’s push for adoption of indigenous technologies, and endorsement by ministers, officials and departments, along with social media buzz, played a key role in these downloads and Daily Active Usage (DAU) of Arattai to record highs.
Data reveal that Arattai’s downloads and DAUs soared in India to 185,000 and 40,000 week-over-week, respectively, between September 21 and 27.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his ministers, and many others have been actively campaigning to encourage initiatives like Make-in-India and self-reliance.
Market intelligence company Sensor Tower, which tracks mobile app metrics across Google and Apple Play stores, found that about 100,000 Arattai downloads were taking place per day since September 25 after Vaishnaw posted about the app. Before this, it averaged just around 300 daily downloads in India.
This month, until September 27, Arattai downloads in India numbered around 400,000, as compared to just about 10,000 in the whole of August. It also averaged 200,000 DAUs in India the past weekend (September 26-27), a significant increase from just about 1,000 average DAUs over the past 30 days, Sensor Tower data showed.
WhatsApp’s current DAU in India is said to be nearly 500 million.
“This past weekend, the Arattai app reached the top spot for social networks and has since maintained its rank.” Sensor Tower analysts said.
The surge in adoption and the need to add infrastructure support to manage it was also flagged by Zoho’s Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu. In a post on X on Monday, he said that sign-ups have gone up 100 times and that his company is adding infrastructure on an emergency basis.
Vembu said that he is talking to experts, including Sharad Sharma of iSpirt, to standardize and publish the messaging protocols of Arattai. The larger vision, he says, is to make the app “interoperable like UPI and email and not closed like WhatsApp.”
Arattai was launched in a Beta version in 2021 when many users questioned WhatsApp’s privacy stance. The app shot into the limelight last week after several Union Ministers, including Vaishnaw, Piyush Goyal, and Dharmendra Pradhan expressed support and intent to move to the indigenous application for their communication needs.
“Nothing beats the feeling of using a Swadeshi product. So proud to be on Arattai, a Made-In-India messaging platform that brings India closer,” Goyal said in a post on X.
“We built Arattai because we felt we needed that kind of engineering capability in Bharat. We need a lot more of such capabilities and Zoho has some very ambitious, long-range R&D projects in the pipeline including compilers, databases, OS, security, hardware, chip design and robotics, among others. We have a policy of ignoring short term profits, as long as we don’t lose money,” Vembu said in another post.
He also clarified that Zoho does host its products on AWS or Azure. “Arattai, specifically, is not hosted on AWS or Azure or GCloud. We use some of those services for regional switching nodes to speed up traffic but data is not stored in them.”
