Sridhar Vembu shrugs off Arattai’s slide in the charts, says rankings don’t matter in a 15-year plan

Arattai

Zoho founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu has downplayed concerns over the company’s messaging app Arattai dropping out of India’s top 100 apps list. In a conversation with ANI, Vembu dismissed the idea that the decline signals a setback, calling the fluctuation a normal part of product development and urging critics to avoid reading too much into short-term rankings.

Vembu said it is unrealistic to expect any product to enjoy uninterrupted growth. He noted that he had already told his employees that the app’s earlier surge was temporary and nothing to celebrate. For him, resilience and long-term commitment matter far more than short-lived chart positions. He stressed that companies capable of surviving and thriving adopt a long-term lens rather than chasing weekly metrics or reacting to public commentary.

He added that Zoho is not distracted by outside noise. Instead, the team remains focused on engineering and continuous improvement. According to Vembu, people who mock Arattai’s temporary dip are “wasting their time,” while Zoho is concentrating on building better technology. The company views Arattai not as a quick-growth venture, but as a five to fifteen-year strategic project.

Vembu highlighted that Zoho has been developing messaging technology for a decade, which makes a single month’s ranking change irrelevant. He reiterated that Arattai is strengthening with each update and that the company plans to continue rolling out improvements. As part of its roadmap, Zoho is working on enhancing security and has already implemented end-to-end encryption, although some updates will take time to filter through.

He also argued that the broader messaging landscape needs credible competition to prevent entrenched players from becoming complacent. Genuine rivalry, he said, is the only mechanism that keeps dominant platforms from behaving like monopolies. With Arattai, Zoho aims to provide that competition, backed by a strategy built on persistence rather than quick wins.