Over the past couple of weeks, Arattai, developed by Indian tech company Zoho, has become a viral sensation in the country. The company says it saw seven million downloads in “seven days last week”, without specifying the dates. According to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, Arattai’s downloads were less than 10,000 in August.
Arattai had a soft launch in 2021, but not many had heard of it. The sudden surge in its popularity is being linked to the federal government’s push for self-reliance as India deals with the impact of the steep US trade war. It’s a message that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ministers have repeated over the past few weeks – make in India and spend in India. This impacted the sudden surge of app downloads in India.
The company has not provided details about their active users, but experts say that they are still a far cry from the 500 million monthly active users that Meta’s WhatsApp has in India. India is WhatsApp’s biggest market, and the app is almost a way of life in the country, with people using it for everything from sending bulk good morning wishes to running their businesses.
Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower says that more than 95% of Arattai’s monthly active users in September were based in India. Arattai has features similar to WhatsApp and allows users to send messages and make voice and video calls. Both apps also offer a set of business tools and, just like WhatsApp, Arattai claims that it is built to operate smoothly on low-end phones and even on slow internet speeds.
Arattai isn’t the first Indian app to dream of replacing huge international rivals. In the past, Indian-made apps such as Koo and Moj had been touted as replacements for X and TikTok (after the Indian government banned the Chinese app in 2020), respectively, but they never really took off after their initial success. Even ShareChat, once touted as the big rival to WhatsApp, has tempered its ambitions.
