There has been a growing consciousness about the need of Indian companies to build software for the home masses that can take over the role played by global tech giants for years. Zoho has a long history of competing with the global giants with its business solutions but the company’s new app Arattai has made quite a wave on social media with netizens terming it as the ‘WhatsApp killer’.
Not only is the India-made app giving tough competition to WhatsApp, it already features a few features that make it instantly stand out from the global rival.
Five features that Arattai has that WhatsApp lacks:
1) Meetings:
While WhatsApp’s video calling feature has got various updates in the last few years, the feature is nowhere close to the Meetings feature that Arattai boasts. The feature allows users to conduct meetings similar to Google Meet and Zoom but from the convenience of their messaging app.
The Meetings feature which is present on the bottom dock in the Arattai app has options for creating an instant meeting, joining a meeting and scheduling a meeting for a later time. Users can also see all their scheduled meetings and previous meetings right from this menu.
2) Pocket:
If you are like me, you must have sent a message to yourself on WhatsApp to save some important information. Once again, Arattai takes this a step further with the ‘Pocket’ feature which acts as the user’s personal ‘cloud storage’ to share messages, media and more.
3) Mentions:
While it can sometimes become a hassle to see where you did a notification from on WhatsApp, the same is not the case on Arattai. The app has a Slack-like ‘Mentions’ section which lists all the texts that have mentioned the user.
4) No ads:
Arattai features no ads so far and also assures users that it will not be using their data for advertising. In contrast, WhatsApp has started showing ads in the Updates tab and also shares some data with its parent Meta for advertising purposes.
Arattai also says that it stores all the data related to its users in data centers across the country.
However, one thing to note here is that Arattai offers end-to-end encryption for voice and video calls, but regular text messages aren’t fully protected yet. Meanwhile, WhatsApp has end-to-end encryption for both text messages and calls.
5) No forced AI:
Meta has added AI on WhatsApp and other social media platforms over the last few months without caring much about whether users want these features or not.
The AI features prominently in the search bar on WhatsApp along with other parts of the app and Meta doesn’t provide a single setting to completely turn off all the AI features in the app.
In contrast, Arattai doesn’t seem to feature any AI features at the moment and while the company can add these features in an incremental manner, hopefully it won’t impose them on users similar to Meta.
