The Wait Is Over: TikTok Resurfaces in U.S. App Stores
The leading social media platform has made its much-anticipated return to U.S. app stores.
Thursday evening saw the restoration of TikTok to their respective app stores on Apple and Google platforms. Nearly a month ago, the short video app was removed in the United States, following a national security law that banned it in the country. The companies have also restored other apps owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, including video editor CapCut and social media app Lemon8, which were equally removed to comply with the law.
Security Concerns
The U.S. was driven by national security concerns amid ByteDance’s Chinese origins for several years. Former U.S. President Joe Biden, passed a law last year that called on ByteDance to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to a company that wasn’t owned by a Chinese entity by January 19, 2025, or be banned from the country. App store operators would have been affected, too, as the law would have imposed severe financial penalties on them if they didn’t comply. Following appeals by ByteDance, the Supreme Court voted to uphold the law on January 17.
The current U.S. President, Donald Trump has made some changes. On January 20, he signed an executive order aimed at delaying the ban, giving ByteDance a 75-day extension to find a buyer for its U.S. operations. As a result, TikTok promptly restored services in the country. Service providers like Oracle also restored their services to the app, but Apple and Google kept the app out of their U.S. app stores, due to some confusion regarding the penalties that would be imposed since the law had only been deferred.
Back in the Game
TikTok may be back, but users in the U.S. who had uninstalled it were not able to reinstall the app, but those who had not were able to use it. Trump has since suggested that the U.S. could own a 50% share in TikTok through a joint venture with other tech companies as an alternative to the ban. He signed an executive order to create a sovereign wealth fund and suggested the fund could be used to purchase TikTok’s U.S. operations.
Tech giants, Oracle and Microsoft are said to be in the running to buy the app. Against the backdrop of the news, rival social networks have tried to bank on the uncertainty around TikTok, which was the second most downloaded app in the U.S. last year, with 52 million downloads. Both X and Bluesky quickly launched dedicated vertical video feeds. Even Meta announced a video editing app that would compete with CapCut.
