My Spitball Theory on TikTok’s Current Semi-Reprieve in the U.S.

Tuesday, 28 January 2025

Here’s an addendum to my post yesterday on the recent shake-up atop the generally stable “top free downloads” list in the App Store. Some of the shake-up is from new entrants, like the much-ballyhooed AI chatbot DeepSeek. But a lot of it is the direct result of the sudden absence of ByteDance’s entire lineup of apps: TikTok, CapCut, Lemon8, and Marvel Snap. Alternatives are vying to fill those voids. [Update, one day later: Marvel Snap is back in the App Store, because it now has a new publisher.]

TikTok returning to operational service in the U.S. after an outage of just one day has squelched the outrage surrounding its ban. The app stopped working; TikTok users, unprepared for its ban, freaked out; the app started working again the next day; and TikTok fans more or less went back to scrolling their feeds and shut up. Controversy over.

But the controversy shouldn’t be over. And unless something changes, it’s going to slowly simmer back to an eventual boil.

Nobody is really talking about the fact that ByteDance apps remain banned, legally speaking, in the U.S. right now, and already-installed copies of their apps are only continuing to function because TikTok’s U.S. cloud providers, Oracle and Akamai, restored service on the word of President Trump that they won’t be held accountable for doing so, despite being in clear violation of the PAFACA Act. But neither Apple nor Google has restored any of ByteDance’s apps to the App Store or Play Store. That hasn’t interfered with TikTok going back to operational via copies of the app already installed on users’ phones, but it’s an insurmountable — although incremental — problem in the long run.

The conventional wisdom is that Oracle and Akamai are being a bit reckless (“If Trump says we’re good, we’re good — what could go wrong, it’s not like Trump has ever changed his mind...”) and Apple and Google are prudent, more staid (“We’re following the letter of the law and will continue to follow the letter of the law”). And perhaps that’s all there is to this. But now that we’re over a week into this post-ban period, I’m starting to wonder if it’s purely a coincidence that these four companies split along these lines. The two cloud providers required for TikTok to function on one side, the two app store providers on the other.

With TikTok’s cloud provider access shut off, it was like a guillotine. TikTok was working for everyone in the U.S., then boom, it was shut down for everyone. Then, just as suddenly, it was back.

Being locked out of the App Store and Play Store, on the other hand, is a slow squeeze. The first thing that comes to mind, obviously, is no new users. No growth. TikTok already has a mind-boggling number of users in the US (estimates seem to range from 120 to 170 million), but no growth is no growth.

The second thing that comes to mind is no app updates for US users. No new features. No bug fixes. No security patches. TikTok, like most popular apps, typically pushes updates to the App Store and Play Store every two or three weeks. What happens now that that’s stopped for US users? Is ByteDance still going to push app updates to users in the rest of the world? TikTok obviously has a lot of American users but most of its users live elsewhere.

But the third factor is the most insidious: even if the build of TikTok already installed on an American user’s phone continues to function, that user can’t reinstall TikTok (or any of ByteDance’s other apps) on a new or restored phone until those apps are back in the app stores. Wipe and restore your phone from backup? No more TikTok. Buy a new phone? No TikTok on the new phone.

Trump’s reprieve was a declaration that the Justice Department wouldn’t enforce the law for 75 days. If ByteDance doesn’t sell TikTok — and it sure doesn’t seem like they have any more intention to sell it now than they did before the ban took effect — what happens? Another (even more shambolically illegal) Trump extension that only keeps TikTok functioning, but not available in the app stores? Because the other side isn’t budging either: China hawks like Senator Tom Cotton have not shifted an inch. They’re tolerating Trump’s 75-day reprieve but not budging from their overall “sell or you’re banned” stance.

I’m not saying this is a backroom plot between the administration and these companies, but I’m not saying it isn’t a backroom agreement either. Trump isn’t complaining about Apple and Google not getting on board. And neither Apple nor Google seem worried about Trump’s wrath for not following Oracle and Akamai’s leads. The goal of the legislation isn’t to pull the plug on TikTok for Americans — it’s to pressure ByteDance (and really, their bosses in the Chinese Communist Party) into selling the app. Instantly banning TikTok’s US operations resulted in instant and vociferous outrage from TikTok users — the pressure turned out not to be on ByteDance and the CCP, it was on the US government to give people back their beloved TikTok. So I think everyone on the US side is looking at the current detente — TikTok being available to existing users through existing copies of the app, but not being available in app stores — as a way to turn the pressure up only on ByteDance. Slowly strangle TikTok over a period of months, rather than behead it overnight.

But what happens if the CCP stands pat? If they just wait it out? If ByteDance were a normal company they’d face financial pressure to capitulate and sell. But the CCP isn’t under any financial pressure to allow ByteDance to sell. Say what you will about the Chinese government, but they do not lack for patience. What happens then, when word starts spreading amongst TikTok fans not to upgrade their phones, lest they lose access to the app? Apple’s going to have some strong feelings about that.