After WhatsApp's Warning, Arattai Pulls The Plug On Usernames

Amidst the battle between Centre and WhatsApp, Zoho’s Co-Founder, Sridhar Vembu said that Zoho backed Arratai would remove its username-based account feature.

This comes in shortly after the Central government expressed concerns over WhatsApp’s newly launched username rollout. A feature that allowed users to interact with each other just through their usernames thereby omitting the need to use numbers. The Central government however expressed concerns over this and paused the rollout, stating the possibility of identity theft and cyber frauds.

Following this, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had asked Meta to pause the rollout of this feature.

In the background of this development, Sridhar Vembu took to X and said, “We will be disabling the user name based account feature in Arattai, to comply with the regulatory change.”

Arattai is Zoho's privacy-focused instant messaging platform offering text messaging, voice calls and video calls with end-to-end encryption, launched as a Made-in-India alternative to foreign messaging apps. It has become one of the first messaging applications in India to publicly respond to the government’s concerns over username-based messaging.

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