India’s homegrown WhatsApp rival surges past 7.5M downloads – Asia Tech Review

Welcome back—I’m home (and alive) after the madness of Token2049 in Singapore, which we will get to shortly. This week our focus is on India. The country is WhatsApp’s largest market when it comes to users, but there’s a local rebellion that’s gradually gaining momentum. Arattai, a homegrown messaging platform from software giant Zoho, crossed 7.5 million downloads last week as figures in India clamour for a local alternative to the Meta-owned chat app. New signups jumped from around 3,000 per day to more than 300,000. Arattai, which means ‘casual chat’ in Tamil, is not exactly new. It was first launched in 2021, but its profile is on the rise after it was endorsed by senior government officials and India’s venture capital community. Zoho itself is a unique company. It produces software for businesses and bootstrapped itself to revenues of more than $1 billion per year, as of 2022 , with offices across India, the US, Europe and other parts of Asia. Like other Zoho products, Arattai comes packed with features. It leans on WhatsApp and Telegram for basic messaging, and includes Slack-like features, video calling and more. The appeal is simple: data sovereignty. That’s a topic that is gaining
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