Nearly a month after removing the short video app due to a national security statute that prohibited it in the U.S., Apple and Google on Thursday night brought TikTok back to their respective app stores.
In order to comply with the law, the firms also restored additional apps that were owned by ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, including the social media app Lemon8 and the video editor CapCut.
Former U.S. President Joe Biden last year passed a law requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to a company that wasn’t owned by a Chinese entity by January 19, 2025, or face expulsion from the country, in response to national security concerns raised over the company’s Chinese origins for several years. Following ByteDance’s appeals, the Supreme Court ruled on January 17 to uphold the regulation, which would have placed harsh financial penalties on app store operators for noncompliance.
However, on January 20, shortly after taking office, current U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to postpone the ban, granting ByteDance an additional 75 days to find a buyer for its U.S. operations.
Services were quickly restored nationwide by TikTok. Because the regulation had just been postponed, there was some misunderstanding about the fines that would be applied, thus Apple and Google kept the app off of their U.S. app stores, even though service providers like Oracle had restored their services to the app.
Users in the United States were allowed to use TikTok, but those who had removed it were unable to reinstall it.
As an alternative to the ban, Trump has since proposed that the United States may acquire a 50% stake in TikTok through a joint venture with other internet firms. He proposed using the sovereign wealth fund to buy TikTok’s U.S. operations and signed an executive order to establish one. Microsoft and Oracle are reportedly in the running to purchase the app.
Competing social media platforms have attempted to capitalize on the ambiguity surrounding TikTok. Meta revealed a video editing tool that would rival Capcut, and both X and Bluesky promptly introduced specialized vertical video streams.
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