Apple and Google will restore access to TikTok in their domestic app stores by the end of Thursday after receiving assurances from federal officials that a new law banning the app’s availability in the United States will not be immediately enforced.
The two tech companies began restoring access to TikTok late Thursday afternoon, but the app may be unavailable to some users for a few hours while Apple and Google’s systems update. The app is expected to be widely available to all by early Friday morning.
This week, U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi wrote a letter to the chief executives at Apple and Google reassuring the tech companies that a law requiring TikTok’s owner ByteDance to divest its American business has been paused for at least a little while. The law was passed last year as part of a federal appropriations bill that included financial aide to Ukraine and Israel for their wartime operations.
Under the law, ByteDance would lose the support of American tech companies if the company did not divest its U.S. operations by at least January 19. ByteDance is based in China; the company previously said the Chinese government would not allow it to offload its American business, and chose to fight the law in court.
Those efforts were effectively concluded in mid-January when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request for an injunction that would have put the law on indefinite hold while the broader legal challenge was pending in a lower court.
The original law gave any sitting president the ability to put the measure on hold for up to 90 days if ByteDance could demonstrate it was making reasonable efforts to sell its U.S. business. It wasn’t clear if ByteDance was doing this, though President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed a desire for TikTok to continue operating in the country. He supported efforts to ban the app during his first term in office.
Despite the moratorium, Apple and Google pulled access to TikTok from their domestic app stores after some federal lawmakers warned the tech companies could still be held financially liable under the law, despite Trump’s assurances that they would not.
The app was still available overseas, and some American users resorted to using roundabout methods to install the app on their devices, including a practice known as “sideloading” on Android phones and tablets, and by changing the Apple app store region to another country, then using a virtual private networking (VPN) service to mask their actual location.
The situation primarily affected users of Apple devices, since software can only be installed from Apple’s official app store — something that has been challenged outside the United States. On some secondhand platforms like Facebook Marketplace and eBay, Apple iPhone users with TikTok on their devices were selling them for as much as $4,000, according to listings reviewed by The Desk.
The app could be pulled again from the Apple and Google stores in the future, if ByteDance does not divest its U.S. business or if Congress fails to pass a measure that rescinds last year’s law.
