TikTok exists in a sort of limbo at the moment, not technically shut down as it received an extension to find an American buyer under the Trump administration, but not available in the iPhone or Android app stores due to liability concerns. So if you’re absolutely fiending for that sweet, sweet infinite scroll of vertical video but didn’t remember to install the app on your phone before the soft ban hit, you’ll have to try your luck on eBay, where people are selling phones pre-loaded with the TikTok app for thousands of dollars.
As first spotted by Wired, there are currently about 9,000 eBay item listings for various smartphones that already have TikTok installed. There’s a wide array of devices depending on the preferred make, model, and carrier of your phone. For example, you can grab a TikTok-equipped Samsung Galaxy A54 5G on Consumer Cellular for $250 or a T-Mobile-compatible Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max for $450. But for the most part, if you want one of these TikTok machines, you’ll have to be ready to fork out much, much more than the MSRP.
Most listings have at least three zeros at the end of them, putting the starting price in the thousands—like this iPhone 14 currently listed at $7,500 with, at the time of publication, one person currently holding the item in their cart. There are several listings currently asking in the tens of thousands of dollars, including one that has a list price of $50,000 (or best offer, but either way, you’ll still have to pay shipping which seems a little petty, frankly).
It’s worth noting that there is a difference between items being listed at these prices and people actually buying them. While some of the listings for phones with TikTok installed have thousands of views in the last 24 hours, there is a lot more attention than sales. Most of the devices that have sold, as shown by eBay’s “completed sales” filter, show that sellers often settled for an offer and not the list price. However, some folks have successfully cashed in on opportunism: There is a listing for an iPhone 16 Pro Max that shows it sold for the $12,999 list price (though the seller has zero history on the platform so it’s possible it’s a phony sale).
A similar phenomenon like this has happened before. Back when Flappy Bird was all the rage and the creator eventually decided to pull the app for his own personal sanity, phones that had the game installed sold on eBay, too, including one device that produced a bidding war that resulted in a $99,900 winning bid. That sale ultimately got killed by eBay because it requires all phones sold on its platform to be wiped and restored to factory settings before being shipped out.
It does appear that eBay still requires factory resets for devices sold through its marketplace, so hopefully, the sellers who have sold a phone with TikTok installed haven’t spent those earnings quite yet.
