BBC | Can an Indian-made messaging app compete with the behemoth that is WhatsApp?
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, which means banter in the Tamil language, 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 steep US trade tariffs on its goods.
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.
Federal minister Dharmendra Pradhan said as much when he posted about Arattai on X a fortnight ago urging people to use "India-made apps [to stay] connected". Since then, several other ministers and business leaders have also posted about Arattai.
The company says the push from the government "definitely contributed to the sudden surge in Arattai downloads".
"In just three days, we saw daily sign-ups increase from 3,000 to 350,000. In terms of our user base's active users, we saw a 100X jump, and that number is continuing to rise," Zoho CEO Mani Vembu told the BBC, adding that this also shows that users are "enthusiastic about a homegrown product that can meet all their unique needs and requirements".
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.
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.
Many users have praised Arattai on social media, with some saying that they liked its interface and design while others felt that it matched WhatsApp in usability. Many also took pride in it being an Indian-made app and encouraged others to download it.
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 WhatApp, has tempered its ambitions.
Delhi-based technology writer and analyst Prasanto K Roy says that it will be difficult for Arattai to break through WhatsApp's extensive user base, especially as the Meta-owned platform hosts a large number of businesses and government services on the platform.
Arattai's success will depend on its capacity to not just amass new users but also retain them, he says, which cannot be driven by nationalist sentiment alone.
"The product has to be good, but even then, it's unlikely that it will be able to replace an app that has billions of existing users in the world," Mr Roy adds.
