Zoho's instant messaging app, Arattai, has recently gained significant popularity in India. The app is being touted as a strong domestic challenger to WhatsApp, offering several innovative features unavailable on its rival platform. Recently, Zoho's Chief Scientist, Sridhar Vembu, announced a massive surge in user adoption, with new sign-ups on Arattai increasing 100-fold in just three days. Daily new registrations have jumped from 3,000 to 350,000.
Hike dominated WhatsApp
This is not the first time an Indian app has challenged WhatsApp's dominance in the country. Before the advent of 4G in India, Hike Messenger was a popular local alternative. Hike’s early ambition to take on WhatsApp with a youth-focused app attracted storied investors, including Tiger Global, SoftBank, and Tencent, eventually leading to a $1.4 billion valuation in 2016.
Hike features
Hike was later rebranded as Hike Sticker Chat in April 2019, focusing on a sticker-centric experience. Its key features were expansive: they included a wide variety of multi-lingual stickers, hidden chats for privacy, a built-in wallet for payments, and social tools like a timeline, stories, bill splitting, and event invitations. It also offered unique services like offline messaging via SMS fallback and app customization, attempting to be a comprehensive "super app."
Why Hike shutdown
Despite offering this rich feature set, Hike ultimately struggled to attract users away from rivals, particularly WhatsApp, which commands over 400 million users in India. The company's founder, Kavin Bharti Mittal, attributed the messenger app's 2021 shutdown to the fact that "the global effects were too strong," indicating it could not compete effectively with larger international platforms.
Meanwhile, Zoho has named its new messaging app Arattai. The name "Arattai" is derived from Tamil and means "general conversation" or "gossip".
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