The apps were restored after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Apple stating that the ban would not be enforced immediately, according to Bloomberg.
The companies also restored other apps owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, including the video editor CapCut and the social media app Lemon8, which had been removed to comply with the law.
Driven by national security concerns over ByteDance’s Chinese origins, former U.S. President Joe Biden passed a law last year requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to a non-Chinese company by January 19, 2025, or face a ban in the country. The law also threatened app store operators with heavy financial penalties for non-compliance. After ByteDance's appeals, the Supreme Court upheld the law on January 17.
Soon after taking office, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on January 20 to delay the ban, granting ByteDance an additional 75 days to find a buyer for its U.S. operations.
As a result, TikTok quickly restored its services in the country. Service providers like Oracle also resumed their support for the app. However, Apple and Google kept TikTok out of their U.S. app stores due to confusion about the penalties that would apply, as the law had only been postponed.
U.S. users who had uninstalled TikTok were unable to reinstall the app, while those who had not uninstalled it were still able to use it.
Since then, Trump has proposed that the U.S. could hold a 50% stake in TikTok through a joint venture with other tech companies as an alternative to the ban. Along with signing an executive order to establish a sovereign wealth fund, he suggested that the fund could be used to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations. Oracle and Microsoft are reportedly among the potential buyers.
In response to the uncertainty surrounding TikTok, competing social networks have sought to capitalize on the situation. Both X and Bluesky quickly introduced vertical video feeds, while Meta launched a video editing app aimed at competing with CapCut.
According to analytics firm Sensor Tower, TikTok was the second most downloaded app in the U.S. last year, with 52 million downloads.