On Thursday evening, Apple and Google recovered Tiktok to their respective app stores in the US nearly a month after removing the short video app in accordance with the national security law that banned it at home.
According to Bloomberg, the app was restored after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondy sent Apple a letter saying the ban would not be enforced.
The company has also restored Tiktok’s parent company, Bytedan (the other app owned by video editor Capcut and social media app Lemon8) and removed it to comply with the law.
Last year, former US President Joe Biden spurred national security concerns that aired over many years of Chinese origins last year, and by January 19th, Tiktok was forced to take on a company that was not owned by Chinese companies. It passed a law requesting that US operations be sold. , 2025, or the country will be banned. The law imposes severe financial penalties on App Store operators if they fail to comply, and following the appeal by the ordinance, the Supreme Court voted to uphold the law on January 17th.
But shortly after he took office, current US President Donald Trump on January 20 signed an executive order aimed at delaying the ban, 75-day extension to find buyers for US businesses. I gave it.
Tiktok immediately restored its services domestically. Service providers like Oracle have restored their services to their apps as well, but Apple and Google have locked them out of the US app store due to confusion regarding the penalty they will be charged, just because the law was postponed. .
US users who uninstalled Tiktok were unable to reinstall the app, but were users who were unable to use it.
Since then, Trump has suggested that the US could own 50% share of Tiktok through joint ventures with other tech companies as an alternative to the ban. Along with signing an executive order to establish a sovereign wealth fund, he proposed that the fund could be used to purchase Tiktok’s US business. Oracle and Microsoft are said to be running to buy apps.
Rival social networks have tried to steal the bank for uncertainty around Tiktok. Both X and Bluesky have quickly launched their own vertical video feeds, and Meta has announced a video editing app that competes with Capcut.
According to data from Analytics Firm Sensor Tower, Tiktok was the second-most downloaded app in the US last year, with 52 million downloads.