TikTok was restored to the Apple App Store and Google Play on Thursday night following weeks of limbo after President Donald Trump's administration delayed a ban on the social media app. The app, though accessible to users who had already downloaded, hasn't been available for download as questions remained about the potential enforcement of the ban. Android users were able to access the app directly from the TikTok website earlier in the day. TikTok went dark for about 12 hours in on Jan. 18 after the Supreme Court denied parent company ByteDance's argument that a ban on the app infringes on users' free speech.
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 — the 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.
TikTok is back on US app stores after President Donald Trump postponed a ban on the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform. The popular app, which has over 170 million users in the US alone, briefly went dark for American users last month as the deadline of its ban neared. But, on the day he entered office, Trump granted a 75-day extension for the app’s owners to combine with the law or face the ban. Trump announced the decision in a post to his Truth Social account a day after TikTok shut down for millions of its users in the US. The app was removed from Apple and Google's app stores, which were prohibited from offering the platform under a law that required TikTok's China-based parent company ByteDance to sell the platform or face a US ban.
