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Arattai falls out of India’s top 100 apps
Zoho’s homegrown messaging platform Arattai has dropped out of India’s top 100 apps on both Google Play and Apple’s App Store, just weeks after briefly unseating WhatsApp to take the top spot.
Arattai drops out of India’s top 100 apps
As of November 4, Arattai ranks 105th on Google Play and 123rd on the App Store in India, abruptly falling from mid-October when it briefly topped both charts.
Based on combined rankings that include both apps and games, it now sits 150th on Google Play and 128th on the App Store, according to a Moneycontrol report.
Arattai has been developed indigenously, catching momentum in September 2025 after PM Modi called on the nation to adopt homegrown products as part of the Aatmanirbhar Bharat agenda.
Ministers such as Dharmendra Pradhan, Ashwini Vaishnaw, and Piyush Goyal have praised Zoho’s suite of made-in-India digital tools.
All about Arattai
The app has been around since 2021, a year when Meta’s WhatsApp was caught in controversy for changing its privacy policies.
Sridhar Vembu’s Zoho positions Arattai as a privacy-first, secure, feature-rich alternative to foreign-owned messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram.
The name Arattai means “chitchat” in Tamil, or a lightweight, casual experience. It was initially introduced as a test pilot in late 2020 and officially launched in early 2021.
Unlike market leaders, which have had over a decade to build their user bases and network effects, latecomers like Arattai face a huge hurdle to convince users to switch platforms.
Messages are not currently end-to-end encrypted, although Sridhar Vembu told Moneycontrol in an October interview that the company plans to introduce the feature in the next few weeks.
Currently, users have the ‘secret chat’ feature for end-to-end message encryption.
Market leader WhatsApp already offers end-to-end encryption for all personal messages, calls, photos, and videos.
“Like any product, we ensured the technology is hosted in India for data sovereignty and other compliance requirements,” said Zoho CEO Man Vembu, in an earlier interview.
He added that the team is working on the next set of updates to ensure the app continues to deliver more value to users.
However, challenging WhatsApp’s network dominance is an uphill task, given that it has become synonymous with instant messaging in India and is extensively used by small businesses that run their entire operations on the app.
Though several local and international companies have attempted to rival WhatsApp, none have succeeded as yet.
Bharti Airtel scion Kavin Bharti Mittal started Hike in 2012, which initially gained immense traction, amassing 100 million users, but was eventually shut down in January 2021.