Home Innovation IT Services ‘It won’t last, I ...

‘It won’t last, I simply don’t pay…,’ says Sridhar Vembu on Zoho Arattai

IT Services

Sridhar Vembu on Zoho Arattai’s Future – Business Honor

Business Honor
13 November, 2025

Arattai app faces ranking dip but Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu stays focused on long-term growth and privacy.

The Founder and Chief Scientist of Zoho Corporation, Sridhar Vembu, has responded to the app store rankings for the company's Arattai messaging app have recently incurred a significant decline. Despite the app falling out of the top 100 apps on both Google Play Store and Apple App Store in India, Vembu says he remains assured about its success in India, emphasizing the long-term view over short-term shifts in app store rankings. The app was launched earlier in 2021 and earlier this year received a boost when the political leadership in India encouraged citizens to start moving away from foreign applications and start using homegrown solutions.

Arattai was able to gain traction rather quickly with its emphasis on privacy, end-to-end encryption for audio and video calls, and its seamless integration with Zoho's suite of productivity tools. Consequently, the app that was developed for safe communication in business or personal situations reached the upper levels of the Indian app charts for a brief time due to the nationalist sentiment surrounding its "Made in India” tagline and endorsements from technology enthusiasts. Intense competition, user retention and the network effect favoring WhatsApp or other players are typically cited as contributing factors to the app's decline in downloads.

“There is nothing wrong with the idea that something went wrong. It is the normal course of events. Nothing goes straight to the moon. You have to weather the ups and downs. And the trick for the companies that last is that they have a longer view around this… I told our employees, this is a moment in time; it will not last… I simply do not care. And the people who do care and tweet about it are literally wasting their time.” said Sridhar Vembu. While E2E encryption is anticipated to add some element of security into the texting experience, it remains to be determined how Vembu will strike a balance between national security needs and user privacy post his controversial comments on complying with the local law necessities.