Zoho co-founder Sridhar Vembu promoted recent updates to the Arattai messaging app on X, singling out its built-in meetings feature. The post drew a wave of jokes about the app's user base, encryption and name. Arattai, the Indian competitor of WhatsApp, has failed to get the user numbers that it hoped it would.
What Vembu said
In his post, Vembu said Arattai "has seen some nice updates recently" and that it has "excellent meeting capability out of the box," separate from group calls, working across mobile and desktop. Vembu is Zoho's chief scientist. Shailesh Kumar Davey took over as group CEO in January 2025. Meetings are not new to the app: reports from the 2025 surge described users starting or scheduling video meetings from inside it.
How the Internet responded
Most replies were jokes. Vansh Yadav posted a satirical "breaking" item claiming Zoho celebrated "10 users" three years after launch and plans "100 active users by 2047." He also wrote about "all the 4 users of Arattai" and a fictional Vembu reading every message to keep "3 users" lawful. These were satire, not reporting. Other users made real requests, with one writing that Vembu "had a moment to change the name" and another asking him to rename it to something recognisable across India.
The numbers behind the jokes
The jokes exaggerate, but they point at a real issue. Arattai launched in 2021 and stayed small until ministers endorsed it in September 2025. Downloads then hit 13.8 million in October 2025, up from 2.6 million the previous month, and monthly active users rose from 1.17 million to 4.35 million. However, the hype died down as quickly as it rose, and the app had fallen out of India's top 100 apps in November itself. Monthly users dipped to 4.09 million. By comparison, WhatsApp has more than 500 million users in India.
Arattai: The name question
Arattai is a Tamil word for casual chat or banter. Critics say it's hard to remember and pronounce outside Tamil-speaking regions. Zoho has not responded publicly to the requests to rename it.
