Apple and Google on Thursday evening restored TikTok to their respective app stores in the U.S., nearly a month after they removed the short video app 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, (video editor CapCut and social media app Lemon8) that they had removed to comply with the law.
Spurred by national security concerns aired over ByteDance’s Chinese origins for a number of years, former U.S. President Joe Biden last year passed a law 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. The law would have imposed severe financial penalties on app store operators if they didn’t comply, and following appeals by ByteDance, the Supreme Court voted to uphold the law on January 17.
But right after he assumed office, current U.S. President Donald Trump on January 20 signed an executive order aimed at delaying the ban, giving ByteDance a 75-day extension to find a buyer for its U.S. operations.
TikTok promptly restored services in the country. Service providers like Oracle restored their services to the app as well, but Apple and Google kept the app out of their U.S. app stores since there was some confusion regarding the penalties that would be imposed since the law had only been deferred.
For users in the U.S., those who had uninstalled TikTok were not able to reinstall the app, but those who had not were able to use it.
Since then, Trump has suggested the U.S. could own a 50% share in TikTok through a joint venture with other tech companies as an alternative to the ban. Alongside signing an executive order to create a sovereign wealth fund, he suggested the fund could be used to purchase TikTok’s U.S. operations. Oracle and Microsoft are said to be in the running to buy the app.
Rival social networks have tried to bank on the uncertainty around TikTok. Both X and Bluesky quickly launched dedicated vertical video feeds, and Meta announced a video editing app that would compete with Capcut.
According to data from analytics firm Sensor Tower, TikTok was the second most downloaded app in the U.S. last year, with 52 million downloads.
