Zoho launches its Arattai app as WhatsApp rival

Zoho Corporation has positioned its Arattai app as the one messaging app which can become “core to users’ daily lives”, amid a user exodus from WhatsApp over privacy policy changes.

The beta version of Arattai, which means to chit-chat in Tamil, was launched last week after Zoho employees began looking for alternatives to the world’s largest messaging service. Its features include end-to-end encryption, a digital locker, cloud storage and games. App data will not be shared with third parties and will be stored in India.

WhatsApp is updating its privacy policy and terms of service to share significantly more user information with parent Facebook Inc. And while the company clarified that the new privacy update is limited to business interactions and doesn't impact how people communicate privately, that hasn’t stopped users from jumping ship to rivals Signal and Telegram, which are said to have better end-to-end encryptions.

Sridhar Vembu, founder and the chief executive officer of Zoho Corporation, said, “You will see voice and video capabilities (in Arattai), which have taken about 8-10 years of R&D that went into various products that we built…. Arattai itself comes from our Cliq platform, which is an enterprise messaging platform. We are repurposing a lot of the techn towards a faster scale consumer-class product.”

Arattai’s capabilities include chats, group chats of up to 1,000 people, file sharing, document scanning, and secret chats. It has so far recorded a total of 20,000 downloads on Apple’s App store and Google Pay.