On January 20, after a chaotic weekend, Donald Trump granted TikTok a 75-day reprieve to comply with the law signed by his predecessor in the White House. Joe Biden and his administration had demanded the sale of TikTok's American operations to an American buyer for national security reasons.
With the Supreme Court siding with the law, ByteDance, the social network's parent company, has no choice but to find a buyer by early April — the alternative is to ban TikTok outright from the US, where the app has 170 million users and is the basis of many businesses.
Thanks to this reprieve, TikTok is once again accessible in the United States. But mobile app stores refuse to put the app back on their shelves, which is a big problem: the social network is stagnating in one of its most important markets. While iOS is completely locked down, Android is a little more open and it is possible to download the app in the form of an APK from the internet.
A temporary solution for TikTok on Android
TikTok offers American users a page and instructions for installing the app on their Android smartphone. The operation is not as simple as installing an application from the Play Store, but it is an alternative solution that has the merit of existing, unlike iOS (sideloading is only authorized in Europe thanks to the DMA).
Installing Android apps from the internet can have security consequences, so you have to be absolutely certain of what you are doing and of the seriousness of the developer. Still, this doesn’t get TikTok out of the woods: downloading the app is one thing, accessing its content is another.
If ByteDance doesn’t find a solution by April, TikTok’s American providers that store and distribute the videos—Oracle and Akamai—will be forced to turn off the taps for good, even though they reopened them on Trump’s orders. So being able to install the app won’t do much good!
Source: TikTok
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