Arattai vs WhatsApp: Indian user data hosted in India only, Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu says
Zoho does not host Arattai data on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, founder Sridhar Vembu says amid an online debate over Arattai versus WhatsApp.
The data of Indian users on Arattai and other Zoho apps remains in India only, Sridhar Vembu said on Tuesday, amid an online debate over data privacy and encryption vis-a-vis WhatsApp.
“Indian customer data is hosted in India (Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai, soon Odisha),” the Zoho Corp. founder wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Arattai specifically is not hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services or (Microsoft) Azure or Google Cloud. We use some of those services for regional switching nodes to speed up traffic but data is not stored in them.”
Vembu’s comments were aimed at addressing “a lot of false information we want to correct” about the Arattai app, which has seen a renewed interest among Indian users after Union Ministers Ashwini Vaishnaw, Dharmendra Pradhan and Piyush Goyal endorsed the chat app on social media. Such has been the response that Arattai has become the top downloaded app on App Store and is nearing the Top 100 on Google Play store.
“Our Zoho Developer account in the App Store and Play Store lists our US office address because the account was registered there in the very early days of those stores by one of our employees in the US just to test them out. We never changed that.”
According to Vembu, all Zoho services “run on hardware we own and software frameworks we developed”, on top of open source like Linux OS.
“All the (Zoho) products are developed in India. Our global headquarters is in Chennai and we pay taxes in India on our global income,” Vembu went on to say in his X post. “As a global corporation headquartered in India, we have offices in over 80 countries and have a strong presence in the US, which is a big market for us.”
“We are proudly ‘Made in India, Made for the World’, and we mean it.”
What Is Arattai App?
Arattai—which means “casual chat” in the Tamil language—is a messaging app similar to WhatsApp available for both business and individual use to send messages, make voice and video calls, send documents, share stories and broadcast channels. It has end-to-end encryption for phone calls but not end-to-end encrypted messaging, a la WhatsApp.
To be sure, “a big release” was planned for the Arattai app in November but the service has gone viral already, according to Vembu.
“As a matter of fact, we had planned a big release by November, with a lot of features you would expect, a huge capacity addition and a marketing push,” Vembu wrote on X on 29 September. “And then it suddenly went viral.”
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Zoho has seen traffic on Arattai app surge by 100 times in three days—new sign-ups increased from 3,000/day to 350,000/day—so much so that “we are adding infrastructure on an emergency basis for another potential 100X spike”, Vembu said.
“As we add a lot more infrastructure, we are also fine-tuning and updating the code to fix issues as they arise. We have all hands on deck, working flat out.”
