Overview

• Sridhar Vembu says daily sign-ups leapt from about 3,000 to roughly 350,000 in three days, with teams adding infrastructure after OTP and contact-sync delays.
• Zoho is in early talks with iSpirt’s Sharad Sharma to publish and standardize messaging protocols, with Vembu asserting the service should be interoperable and not a monopoly.
• Vembu clarifies Arattai runs on Zoho’s own stack rather than AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, with Indian user data hosted in Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai, and Odisha planned, and no data stored on public-cloud switching nodes.
• Calls are end-to-end encrypted while chat E2EE is still in development, with a broader update targeted for November, shaping Arattai’s privacy posture versus rivals.
• The app hit the top spot in the iOS social networking charts after endorsements from Union ministers Ashwini Vaishnaw and Dharmendra Pradhan, though analysts flag WhatsApp’s network effects as a key hurdle.