Skittish Apple and Google both finally put TikTok back in their app stores

Three weeks after TikTok went down for a handful of hours, Apple and Google have finally made the app available again.

By William Hughes | February 13, 2025 | 11:53pm

Image: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

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Skittish Apple and Google both finally put TikTok back in their app stores

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Our long national nightmare is finally etc., as both Google and Apple moved tonight to put social media video app TikTok back in their respective app stores. The app has been absent from both storefronts for nearly a month at this point, having been pulled back around when TikTok (briefly) went down on January 19 over questions about whether the government would enforce a previously passed ban on it. Three weeks—and one executive order from the White House saying it wouldn’t bother enforcing the law for the first 75 days of Donald Trump’s second term in office—later, and both tech companies apparently finally feel comfortable making the app available again without worrying that the App Cops would come kicking down their door.

This, presumably, is big news for anyone who didn’t already have TikTok on their phones, a number of people that presumably includes literally dozens of folks wondering what all this “potential international incident” fuss was about, and tech journalists continually trying to snag the app to see if it was available for download again. The fact that it took several weeks to return to the storefronts suggests a certain hesitancy on the part of Google and Apple to violate the letter of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, even if Trump’s executive order spells out that no one will get in trouble for violating the law during the 75 additional days it adds to the sale countdown. Citing security concerns, the original Act requires Chinese tech firm ByteDance to sell TikTok (and its other American apps, including Lemon8 and CapCut, which are also now available again for download through at least the Google Play store) to a non-“foreign adversary”-based company. No frontrunners came forward to buy the services in the 270 days Joe Biden gave ByteDance to make the sale before the law went into effect; so far, we haven’t seen any serious contenders step up since Trump took office again, either, meaning that April 5 deadline is already starting to loom.