India’s own messaging application, Arattai, recently entered the competition against WhatsApp with a significant surge in downloads. However, concerns were raised by critics about the absence of end-to-end encryption on the Zoho platform, which is crucial for privacy-conscious users. In response, Zoho’s founder, Sridhar Vembu, has confirmed the upcoming implementation of end-to-end encryption on Arattai.
Vembu disclosed the rollout plan for end-to-end encryption in a recent post, stating that the process will commence Tuesday night. Users are advised to update their Arattai app from the respective app stores and encourage their contacts to do the same to enable this feature.
End-to-end encryption guarantees that only the sender and receiver can access the exchanged messages, a feature already present in platforms like WhatsApp for all conversations.
According to Vembu, users must be on the latest version of Arattai to utilize end-to-end encryption for individual chats. He emphasized that encrypted chat will only be possible with contacts who are also on the latest version.
When both parties have updated to the newest Arattai version, a new encrypted chat session will be initiated, and previous non-encrypted chats will be archived. Vembu clarified that users won’t be able to continue old chat sessions with contacts who have switched to the encrypted version.
For contacts using older versions of Arattai, users can maintain non-encrypted chat sessions for up to three days before being prompted to update. After this grace period, all users will be automatically upgraded to the latest version with end-to-end encryption becoming mandatory.
Initially, group chats on Arattai will not support end-to-end encryption, but Vembu assured that efforts are underway to introduce this feature for groups of a specific size in the coming weeks.
At the launch, users will not have the option to back up encrypted chats. However, a backup feature for end-to-end encrypted conversations is expected to be available within two weeks, as per Vembu.
The Arattai team hinted at upcoming features post the transition to secure messaging, promising additional functionalities in the pipeline. Despite its previous high ranking on app stores, Arattai has dropped out of the top 100 in India but anticipates a resurgence with the new security measures.
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