The instant messaging app has seen an exponential growth in installs, usage and app store rankings

The government’s push to go ‘Swadeshi’ in tech, endorsement by senior ministers, and the overall social media buzz have taken the downloads and daily active usage (DAU) of Zoho’s messaging app Arattai to record highs.

Data sourced by businessline from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, show that Arattai’s downloads and DAUs have soared 185X and 40X week-over-week, respectively, in India. This jump was observed between September 21 and September 27 when the spotlight was thrown on the app by government representatives.

The instant messaging app from software firm Zoho, that is being touted as a WhatsApp rival, has seen an exponential growth across all parameters such as installs and usage, and app store rankings.

Sensor Tower, which tracks mobile app metrics across Google and Apple Play stores, estimates that Arattai is seeing about 1,00,000 downloads per day since September 25 — after a Union Minister posted about the app. Before this, Arattai averaged just around 300 downloads in India per day.

Arattai has amassed roughly 4,00,000 downloads in India in September (till September 27) when compared to just about 10,000 downloads in whole of August. Further, Arattai averaged 2,00,000 DAUs in India this past weekend (September 26-27), a significant increase from just about 1,000 average DAUs over the past 30 days, Sensor Tower data showed.

To contrast this, WhatsApp’s current DAU in India is said to be around 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, Vembu said that sign-ups have gone up 100 times and that the company is adding infrastructure on an emergency basis.

Separately, Vembu also said that he is talking to experts such as Sharad Sharma of iSpirt, to standardise and publish the messaging protocols of Arattai. The larger vision, he says, is to make the app “interoperable like UPI and e-mail and not closed like WhatsApp”.

Arattai, Zoho’s messaging app, launched in Beta back in 2021 at a time when WhatsApp’s privacy stance came into question by users. The app, however, has not been marketed heavily by Zoho over the years. It has been propelled into the limelight recently after a host of Ministers from the Government of India including Piyush Goyal, Ashwini Vaishnav and Dharmendra Pradhan expressed support and intent to move to the 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,” he said.

Published on September 30, 2025