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Following a 21 September 2025, call by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asking India to switch to indigenous digital alternatives, the Indian messaging app Arattai has quickly become a synonym of Indian digital autonomy. India Today reported that its daily downloads increased 100 times within three days from 3,000 to 350,000. Supported by the Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and created by Zoho, Arattai manages to position itself as the local alternative to WhatsApp and Telegram.“Guided by Honourable PM Shri Narendra Modi ji’s call to adopt Swadeshi, I appeal to everyone to switch to India-made apps to stay connected with friends and family.” quoted Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, referencing the Prime Minister’s broader message.
It concentrates on data privacy, local storage in data, and accessibility even on low-end devices and networks, and it is designed to support specifically Indian users. As Arattai expands its infrastructure to handle this demand which is exploding, there is doubt as to whether it will be able to continue growth and compete with the established global giants in features, security and user trust. This article discusses how Arattai could compete with WhatsApp and Telegram based on its Swadeshi identity and technology designed by the specifics of the Indian digital environment.
Data residency and sovereignty
The advantage of Arattai is that it keeps all user information in data centers located in India under the management of Zoho, which complies with Indian data legislation and gives greater control over access to data and its surveillance. WhatsApp, a subsidiary of Meta Platforms, saves information on global cloud infrastructure, which is spread across different countries, exposing Indian user information to international jurisdictions and laws, and this poses a risk of foreign surveillance and legal ambiguities.
Arattai hosts all user data in the Indian servers of Zoho, without engaging the big global cloud providers. This sovereignty of local data ensures that the Indian data privacy standards are adhered to and foreign surveillance risks are minimised. Telegram being a global app has distributed data centers and has undergone regulatory inspections in terms of adherence to laws on data protection across the regions. The model proposed by Arattai has peculiar benefits to Indian users who are worried about Swadeshi digital products and the control of local data, whereas the Telegram is managed within the framework of multi-national data jurisdiction.
Encryption and privacy functions in Arattai app
WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted by default, and all text, voice, and video calls and media transfers are secure. Arattai now only offers end-to-end encryption in voice and video calls, and encryption of texts is still being developed. This lack of textual message security is a major drawback of Arattai but the company is confident to improve this soon. Telegram implements a hybrid encryption design: Cloud chats are encrypted with a client server/server client design, but Telegram can use optional Secret Chats with E2EE to encrypt messages, voice and video calls. Although not all of the chats are E2EE by default, Telegram has an extensive Secret Chats option that is popular and well-developed to provide a better level of security. The bigger, more established encryption ecosystem of Telegram provides more options, but Arattai is still in the phases of implementing strong encryption of all communications.
Data advertising and monetisation model
Arattai stands out because of its rigid no advertisement policy and an explicit prohibition of monetising its data, which develops a user-focused privacy policy. Although it is not engaged in advertising in WhatsApp at present, it falls under the larger ecosystem of Meta in which data-driven advertising is a common practice, and metadata gathering can be utilised in a variety of ways, such as ad targeting. This difference is crucial to users who put much value on limited data exploitation.
Arattai keeps all the user data only in India servers hosted by Zoho and does not involve big global cloud providers. This sovereignty of local data is used to guarantee that local data privacy standards are met and that foreign surveillance does not pose a threat. As a universal application, Telegram uses distributed data centers and has been scrutinised by the regulatory bodies on its adherence to the data protection laws of the region.
In the case of Indian users that value Swadeshi digital products and local control over data, the model proposed by Arattai has some special benefits, and Telegram is under a multi-national data jurisdiction regime.
Zoho Arattai app: Scalability and infrastructure
With the support of massive resources of Meta, WhatsApp has infrastructure that is distributed globally and is highly scalable to support more than 2 billion users around the world with ease. Arattai, however, even though download numbers have been skyrocketing of late, is still ramping up its Indian-based server architecture and sometimes has technical hitches caused by unexpected load spikes.
The tremendous global-dispersed infrastructure of Telegram supports high reliability and scalability of more than 800 million monthly active users. The recent 100x increase of the daily downloads at Arattai, as the number of downloads rose between 3,000 and 350,000, has strained its still-immature infrastructure, resulting in delays in OTPs and contact sync, as well as lagging intermittently. As Zoho continues to scale servers to accommodate the projected spikes in demand, Arattai continues to experience growing pains that are common with explosive expansions. The maturity of the infrastructure of Telegram is opposed to the immature infrastructure of Arattai that still has to develop and optimise in India.
Laws and systems and customer confidence
The fact that Arattai is a compliant company in Indian regulatory frameworks and has its origins with an Indian company also increases user trust in the face of mounting opinions on data privacy concerns and the importance of digital autonomy. WhatsApp is struggling with several regulatory issues in India such as decisions related to traceability and content moderation, which contribute to cyclical trust shortages. Telegram has a rich set of features: support of large groups (up to 200,000 members), broadcasting channels, bots, file sharing (up to 2GB per file), voice chats, polls, stickers and bots (Automation) support. The up-and-coming Arattai has features of multi-device sync (Android TV), group chats (up to 1,000 participants), encrypted voice/video calls, and broadcast channels. But the current feature set of Arattai is insignificant when compared to the extensive ecosystem Telegram offers and its third-party integrations. Arattai is designed with an ad-free user experience that is simple and efficient and designed to serve the Indian market whereas Telegram is designed with a rich and customisable interface and a rich array of multimedia features that can serve the rest of the world.
Arattai: Technical problems reported by the company
The sudden surge of popularity of Arattai, although a huge success, has also come at a cost as an example of apps that are quickly and suddenly adopted by users. Zoho, the mother company of Arattai, has publicly admitted that it has been struggling to sustain its infrastructure with the dramatically growing number of users. Some of the technical problems that have been reported by the company include delayed delivery of one- time passwords (OTPs), slower synchronisation of user contacts, and lagging, especially when signing up. All these issues arise because of congestion in servers that are being exposed to a significantly increased traffic than was originally expected. As a reaction, Zoho has responded by promising its users that it is in the process of scaling its server capacity and is striving to increase the number of infrastructure to cope with the surge. The company is trying to fix these glitches in the next few days so that the user experience would be smooth and without interruption.
Although Arattai is being marketed as a privacy-conscious and secure alternative to messaging, the service at the moment lacks default end-to-end encryption (E2EE) when communicating through text. It is a significant disadvantage when talking about the existing competitors like WhatsApp, Signal, and even certain functions in Telegram that have end-to-end encryption of their texts, calls, and video calls. The lack of default E2EE highlights a risk that there is in the privacy framework of Arattai that the company has stated that it is addressing in future releases. This omission points out the common trade-off that are found with sudden scaling and rapid development, in which feature maturation and security improvements can be continuous processes with fast-growing apps.
Altogether, even though the violent expansion of Arattai confirms its status as the solution to the future of Swadeshi messaging, the present infrastructure and security capabilities indicate that the company is experiencing the side effects of an overnight sensation. The promise that Zoho makes to add additional capacity to servers and improve encryption procedures will play a major role in keeping trust and scaling safely in the competitive Indian messaging applications market.
What lies ahead: Scaling and feature evolution
The Zoho cloud infrastructure is highly scalable and is built to absorb explosive growth. As the number of daily sign-ups has increased 100x, performance problems like OTP delays and synchronisation have cropped up but are carefully being resolved. Zoho is actively enhancing the functionality of the app, which will more tightly encrypt data, provide more multimedia capabilities, and more integration with the rest of the Zoho enterprise communication ecosystem, suggesting a mixture of consumer- and business-grade features.
The quick ascendancy of Arattai is a technological and cultural breakthrough in the Indian digital sovereignty in communication applications. It has a unique architecture that is based on open-source foundations and strong focus on local data residency that differentiates it among global messaging giants. Although it needs to be improved in some aspects like full text encryption, this tech-first strategy coupled with the exploding user traction is an indication of a bright future in the competitive messaging apps market in India.