Zoho co-founder and Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu has announced that Arattai, the company’s homegrown messaging platform, is set to receive mandatory end-to-end encryption across its entire system. The change marks one of the most significant updates to the app since its launch.
Full rollout to begin with one to one chats
In an X post on Sunday, Vembu said the team had opted for a full rollout of compulsory encryption, beginning with one-to-one chats and expanding to group conversations soon after. According to him, the shift required substantial redesign work and careful internal testing due to the scale of the change.
Thousands of employees testing the new build
Around 6,000 Zoho employees are currently trialling the updated version. Vembu noted that engineers had already uncovered a number of issues during the initial tests and resolved them, with another test cycle now underway on a fresh build.
If the final checks proceed smoothly, Zoho expects to deploy the update within days. Users will receive a mandatory upgrade, since the revamped encryption model affects the app’s underlying architecture.
Feature already in app but not yet activated
Vembu added that customers can already download the latest version of Arattai, which contains the necessary encryption code, although the feature will remain inactive until testing is complete and Zoho switches it on. The new build also delivers performance improvements, with a faster and more refined interface.
He thanked users for their patience as the company moves towards a more secure messaging experience.
“If all goes well, we plan to deploy in a few days. It will be a forced upgrade on all because it is a drastic change,” highlighted Vembu.
A curious X user by the handle of @personalfinx commented on Vembu’s post, asking, “As a techie, I’m curious… with this new architecture for mandatory E2EE, are you introducing any protocol-level changes (like key rotation strategy or metadata minimisation) that differ from your earlier encryption model? Always love learning how such large-scale security upgrades are engineered.”
To this, the Zoho chief replied, “The protocol level stuff works fine because that has been stable code. The issues we identified were in the mandatory switch over process itself, and also in transferring larger files. The switch over process has been refined now (but we have to do this for millions of users at once, so keeping fingers crossed until it is done). Large file transfer causes memory issues in Android (iPhone works fine) and we are fixing that now.”
