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While TikTok operates in the United States under new ownership, Apple has deployed technical restrictions to block iOS users in the United States from downloading other apps made by the video platform\u2019s Chinese parent organization ByteDance.<\/p>\n
ByteDance owns a vast array of different apps spanning social media, entertainment, artificial intelligence, and other sectors. The leading one is Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which has over 1 billion monthly active users. While most of those users reside in China, iPhone owners around the world have traditionally been able to download these apps from anywhere without using a VPN, as long as they have a valid App Store account registered in China.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not true anymore. Starting in late January, iPhone users in the US with Chinese App Store accounts began reporting that they were encountering new obstacles when they tried to download apps developed by ByteDance. WIRED has confirmed that even with a valid Chinese App Store account, downloading or updating a ByteDance-owned Chinese app is blocked on Apple devices located in the United States.<\/p>\n
Instead, a pop-up window appears that says, \u201cThis app is unavailable in the country or region you\u2019re in.\u201d The restriction appears to apply only to ByteDance-owned apps and not those developed by other Chinese companies.<\/p>\n
Apple and ByteDance declined to comment. TikTok USDS Joint Venture (the new entity controlling TikTok\u2019s US operations) didn\u2019t respond to WIRED\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n
The timing and technical specifics suggest the restriction is related to the deal TikTok agreed to in January to divest Chinese ownership of its US operations. The agreement was the result of the so-called TikTok ban law passed by Congress in 2024, which also barred companies like Apple and Google from distributing other apps majority-owned by ByteDance. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act states that no company can \u201cdistribute, maintain, or update\u201d any app majority-controlled by ByteDance \u201cwithin the land or maritime borders of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
The law was primarily aimed at TikTok, which has more than 100 million users in the US and had been the subject of years of debate in Washington over whether its Chinese ownership posed a national security risk. But ByteDance also has dozens of other apps that at some point were also removed from Apple\u2019s and Google\u2019s app stores in the US. Now it seems like the scope of impact has reached even more apps that are not technically designed for US audiences, such as Douyin, the AI chatbot Doubao, and the fiction reading platform Fanqie Novel.<\/p>\n
WIRED collected dozens of user reports on Chinese social media from people either living in or traveling to the US who said they had been blocked from downloading or updating popular ByteDance-owned apps. These apps are also not available on the Google Play Store, but it\u2019s less of a concern for Android users as their devices have fewer restrictions on downloading apps from non-Google sources.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll ByteDance\u2019s apps seem to be a no-go\u2014Douyin included,\u201d Xiao Peng Digital, a YouTuber and tech creator, posted on social media on January 28. He also shared a screen recording of a friend\u2019s phone failing to update Doubao in the US. \u201cIs it related to the TikTok stuff?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n
Until Wednesday, when a user requested a ByteDance app not available in their region, Apple\u2019s pop-up window displayed a \u201cLearn More\u201d button that linked to a webpage on Apple Support. The link was not functioning as of publication, but an archived version of the link showed that it was first published in January 2025 and explained Apple\u2019s decision to remove TikTok and other ByteDance-owned apps from its app store at the time. After WIRED reached out to Apple about the link, the Learn More button was removed from the pop-up notification.<\/p>\n
\u201cPursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, apps developed by ByteDance Ltd. and its subsidiaries\u2014including TikTok, CapCut, Lemon8, and others\u2014will no longer be available for download or updates on the App Store for users in the United States starting January 19, 2025,\u201d the archived webpage reads.<\/p>\n
As of Thursday, ByteDance apps like TikTok, CapCut (a video editor app). and Lemon8 (an Instagram-like social media platform) remain available on the US App Store, as they are covered by the January 22 deal to transfer TikTok\u2019s US business to a group of investors led by Silver Lake, Oracle, and MGX. But the timing of the deal coincides with Apple\u2019s decision to block this other set of ByteDance apps from being downloaded.<\/p>\n
An executive order issued in September by President Trump extended the deadline of the TikTok ban-or-divest law to January 23, 2026. A day before that deadline, TikTok publicly announced it had entered into a deal, saying that \u201cthe safeguards provided by the Joint Venture will also cover CapCut, and Lemon8, and a portfolio of other apps and websites in the US.\u201d But the announcement never explicitly elaborated on whether other ByteDance apps would be included in the transfer. A few days later, people started reporting they couldn\u2019t download Douyin in the US.<\/p>\n
The restrictions on downloading ByteDance apps in the US shows how Apple is increasingly using technical restrictions to separate different regional versions of the App Store.<\/p>\n
Traditionally, the primary way Apple enforced geographic restrictions on iPhone apps was according to the country where a user registered their Apple ID. To have an Apple account registered in, say, China, a person would typically need to have a phone number, payment method, and billing address in China. But once their account was registered, they could download apps designed for the Chinese market regardless of where they traveled.<\/p>\n
In recent years, however, Apple has been developing more sophisticated mechanisms to identify where an App Store user is physically located. In 2023, the tech outlet 9to5Mac reported that Apple devices had created a new system called \u201ccountryd\u201d to precisely determine a person\u2019s location based on \u201cdata such as current GPS location, country code from the Wi-Fi router, and information obtained from the SIM card.\u201d<\/p>\n
Observers theorized that the new system was created in response to the European Union\u2019s Digital Markets Act, which went into effect in 2024 and required Apple to begin allowing people in the EU to download apps from third-party app marketplaces. Apple complied with the EU regulation, but it restricted the accessibility of alternative app stores only to people physically in the territory of the EU.<\/p>\n
The exact mechanism Apple uses to enable geoblocking of iPhone apps is unclear, says Friso Bostoen, assistant professor of law at Tilburg University who has studied the effect of EU regulations on Apple. \u201cPresumably, there's some on-device processing saying, \u2018Look, this phone is somewhere in the EU borders, so you get an eligibility green check mark.\u2019\u201d And if the device detects that an EU resident leaves the region for more than 90 days, according to Apple\u2019s policy, that eligibility is withdrawn, Bostoen says.<\/p>\n
The new restriction on ByteDance apps in the US resembles the EU-specific geographical restrictions that were previously reported. Some ByteDance users have said that they are able to circumvent the restrictions by using virtual private networks, which allow people to spoof their device\u2019s location, but the work-arounds aren\u2019t foolproof.<\/p>\n
\u201cApple may use the IP address of your internet connection to approximate your location in order to determine whether certain apps that are subject to legal restrictions in some regions can be made available to you,\u201d the App Store\u2019s legal terms explicitly state. But according to online archives of the terms page, this specific sentence was added at the end of January 2025, shortly after the company first removed ByteDance apps from the US version of the App Store.<\/p>\n
So far, there\u2019ve been few instances of Apple actually implementing technical capabilities to geoblock users. \u201cHowever, you could think about this having some wider spillover effects if this becomes the more general way of ensuring that apps that shouldn't be available indeed aren't available,\u201d Bostoen says. \u201cIf Apple gets more sophisticated about blocking access in a way that cannot simply be circumvented with a VPN, obviously citizens in those places are now left with much less liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this story While TikTok operates in the United States under new ownership, Apple has deployed technical restrictions to block iOS users in the United States from downloading other apps made by the video platform\u2019s Chinese parent organization ByteDance. ByteDance owns a vast array of different apps spanning social media, entertainment, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46913,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-46912","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46912\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}