As of 19 January 2025, TikTok has been officially banned in the US. However, that's not the only app that has been banned. To be more specific, it is ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok that got blocked so in turn, its other apps are also restricted in that country.
As a result of the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), federal law prohibits any US company from providing any service to distribute, maintain or update ByteDance's apps. Besides TikTok, TikTok Studio, TikTok Shop Seller, TikTok Lite and CapCut are removed from the Apple App Store and Google PlayStore.
On the other hand, we were surprised to learn that the popular mobile game app, Marvel Snap also got blocked. It was developed by Second Dinner in California and published by Nuverse, which ByteDance owns. With that, other Nuverse mobile game apps such as Land of Empires and Mission EVO are not accessible anymore. Second Dinner posted a statement saying the team is actively "working on getting the game up as soon as possible".
There are also other lesser-known apps by ByteDance. This includes:
- Lemon8, a photo-based social media app that is similar to RedNote (XiaoHongShu)
- Gauth, an app that helps students with their homework
- Hypic, an AI photo-editing app
- Lark, a workspace communications app
- Melolo, Fizzo and MyTopia for online fiction dramas and novels by Poligon, a Singapore-based subsidiary of ByteDance. For some reason, MyTopia Books is still available on the Apple App Store in the US.
- Tokopedia, the largest ecommerce platform in Indonesia was acquired by ByteDance in December 2023. It merged with TikTok Shop's operations after the latter app was banned by the Indonesian government. It is only available on Google's US PlayStore.
Soon, President-elect Donald Trump will return to the office on 20 January 2025 (US Time). He announced a plan to "extend the deadline for sale of TikTok by 90 days", even though the ban is already in effect. To read more about this news, you can head over here to read how it is working again in the US but still removed from the app stores.
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