It finally happened: Following the Supreme Court’s ruling against it, TikTok was legally banned in the United States on Jan. 19. In response, TikTok pulled all of its offerings from U.S. app stores, including popular apps like CapCut and Lemon8, before going dark. If you are one of the 170 million Americans who use TikTok every day, you might’ve be a bit upset by the situation. You might have even flocked to another Chinese-based app, like RedNote.
Just hours after access was blocked for U.S. users, however, TikTok returned, displaying a message thanking “President Trump” for his “efforts”—despite Trump originally floating a plan to ban the app during his first term. Trump posted on Truth Social earlier that day pledging to sign an executive order to extend TikTok’s deadline and work towards a situation where an American company has a 50% share in TikTok. Once sworn into office, he did just that. (Read the latest on the status of the TikTok ban.)
None of this means the app is permanently out of danger. As the law stands, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, still must divest its ownership or face a legal ban in the U.S. It’s not even clear whether Trump has the power to delay enforcing the law, but, at this time, TikTok and other companies are operating as if he does.
If the app is eventually banned in this country, however, that won’t totally stop you from being able to access it. Sure, it might make it much more difficult, but you can potentially keep scrolling just as you did before—at least, for a while.
Why did the U.S. ban TikTok?
We’ve broken the situation down in our explainer, but here’s a brief summary. The U.S. has long had concerns about TikTok, going back to the first Trump administration. The issue is largely based around national security: TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese-based company, and must comply with Chinese law. As such, there are concerns that ByteDance could hand the Chinese government data on the platform’s millions of American users, as well as manipulate the infamously addictively algorithm to control what content Americans specifically see.
It’s not necessarily the app itself that Congress and the President are focused on: It’s the Chinese government. That’s why the “ban” is only part of the law President Biden signed back in April. The language gave ByteDance nine months to find an American-based buyer for TikTok in the U.S. If it had, ByteDance could have divested its stake in TikTok, and the app could have continued to without interruption. The company decided not to do that, however, insisting TikTok (and its proprietary algorithm) was not for sale. So, here we are.
This situation has been wild, and there’s no telling exactly where we go from here. Should the app go dark again, however, you will have some control over your ability to access TikTok in a post-ban American. Here’s how:
Make sure you have TikTok on your phone (assuming it ever returns to app stores)
As of this article, TikTok is still not present on app stores in the U.S. As such, the app is no longer available to download through official channels: If you try to search for TikTok on the iOS App Store or Google Play Store, you’ll find a bunch of similar social media apps, or apps built for TikTok—not TikTok itself. In fact, on iOS, you’ll see a message stating that TikTok and ByteDance apps are not available in your region.
That’s not surprising: It wouldn’t be much of a ban if the government couldn’t force companies to remove apps from their marketplaces. However, while the forces at be can ensure apps like TikTok are barred from app stores, they can’t actually remove apps from your device itself. If you already have TikTok on your iPhone or Android device, it’s staying there—until you delete it yourself. (However, based on the experience of one Lifehacker editor, if you restore your phone from an old iCloud backup, there’s a chance any ByteDance apps will be disabled even if you already have them installed.)
Generally, then, you already have TikTok on your phone, great. If not, you’re in a bit of a rough spot. If TikTok does ever return to app stores, you’ll want to download it right away.
Sideload TikTok (Android only) if you can
There was previously an option for Android users who forgot to download the app before the ban: sideloading. Unlike iOS (in the United States, anyway), Android allows you to sideload apps, or, in other words, install apps from unofficial sources. This has long been a perk of Android over iOS, and although Apple has opened up sideloading for users in the E.U., it remains Android-only for most of the world. As such, if you had wanted to, you could have downloaded the latest version of TikTok to your Android device even though it was no longer available on the Play Store.
Unfortunately, this option appears to be gutted, as well. APKMirror, the go-to option for safe sideloading on Android, is now blocking TikTok and Lemon8 downloads on its platform, citing the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. It’s possible APKMirror will lift this block at some point in the future, perhaps depending on how the TikTok situation seems to be panning out, but, at the moment, this is no longer an option.
As a general note, you want to be careful with sideloading: The practice offers few protections that the app you’re installing is legit. That’s why it’s always better to go through official channels when possible. Google doesn’t always catch the malicious apps, but it does find a lot of them. Going rogue, you run certain risks, especially since the world will know that Android users in the U.S. are looking for unofficial TikTok downloads.
If you do go down this path, you really should use APKMirror rather than a cursory Google search. The site is trusted, and is a popular destination for sideloading.
Get a VPN
If you have TikTok on your phone, no one can take it from you. However, they can break it. Late Saturday night, TikTok blocked network access to the app for users in the U.S. You could still open TikTok, but instead of a login screen or your FYP, you were greeted by a message informing you why TikTok is banned in your country.
If it happens again, many (if not most), will likely continue on to American-based short form videos apps, but not you: Instead, you will be able to keep using TikTok, because you will have a VPN on your device.
A VPN (virtual private network) lets you access parts of the internet your country or government wouldn’t otherwise permit. It works by encrypting your connection and routing it through servers outside your country. If the U.S. doesn’t allow connections to TikTok, for example, a VPN could make it look like you’re accessing the internet from, say, Romania. You can watch TikTok in Romania without issue, so if TikTok’s servers think you’re in the westernmost country in Europe, it’ll connect you. Ban avoided.
There are a ton of VPNs out there to choose from, but you don’t need to get fancy (or even spend any money) to access TikTok post-ban. All you need is a VPN that actively routes your traffic to a country that hasn’t banned the platform, as well as a service that will route traffic within apps—not just within your web browser.
Here’s the tricky bit: Based on the first time the app went dark, it seems TikTok blocks access to any American account, regardless of whether you use a VPN or not. So even if the app thinks you are in Romania, if you are logging in with an account you made in the U.S., no TikTok for you.
You have a couple of options here: First, after setting up a VPN in another country, you could try creating a new account: TikTok will think this account is based in the country you’re VPN is set to, and should let you in without issue. However, if TikTok recognizes your app is American, that could pose further issues.
If all else fails, what I was able to get to work was using TikTok in my browser with a VPN set to a specific country. For some reason, Japan didn’t work, and I received an error message when trying to load TikTok. But when I switched my location to Romania, I was in—of course, with Romanian content pushed to the front page.
I was using Proton VPN to get this to work, which has a great free tier, and should work within the TikTok app on both iOS and Android. The only catch is you can’t choose your country; it picks for you. So you might need to refresh your country a few times before you find one that works. In theory, though, any VPN should work, so long as your connection is routed through a country TikTok supports.
Don’t use the app forever
Even if you get the app to work, you really shouldn’t use it forever.
Here’s the deal: TikTok is staying on your iPhone or Android if you installed it already. But if the developers are no longer supporting the app in the U.S., that means there will be no new features added for your app, nor any fixes for bugs that may appear. So, you might encounter some weird glitches or crashes the longer you use the app following the ban, and you won’t see any of the changes that TikTok makes to the app in supported parts of the world.
But that’s not my concern here. If the only issue was an unstable TikTok experience, well, whatever. But, eventually, the app becomes a security liability. Just as TikTok developers won’t be able to push new features or bug fixes for the app, they also won’t be able to patch any security vulnerabilities they discover down the line. And there will be security vulnerabilities down the line: That’s just an inevitability of software. Eventually, flaws will appear that TikTok will patch for the app in countries it supports, but because it’ll be cut off from the U.S., you won’t see those updates. Instead, you’ll use an app with a growing list of security flaws that bad actors will exploit for their own gain. It probably won’t happen overnight, but after some time, the app becomes a real risk to keep on your device—especially when malicious users know that a country as large as the United States has people using an app without security patches.
Ironically, in banning the app for national security reasons, the U.S. government will have turned it into a security risk of a different making.
But will you want to keep using TikTok anyway?
At the moment, TikTok is back. But what if a sale doesn’t happen, and TikTok eventually goes dark for good? Will you actually want to keep using the app? Sure, at first, everything will likely seem the same, but as the app gets buggier and less secure, the experience will undoubtedly lose its luster.
But it goes beyond that, too. American creators are likely not going to bother posting to an app that is banned in their country, and will switch full-time to other established platforms like Instagram and YouTube. As more and more creators leave, you’ll see less of the content you’re used to engaging with—content you could find on apps that aren’t banned.
Much of the rest of the world will still be posting to TikTok, of course, but it will be interesting to see if any ripple effects come out of this potential ban. Will the loss of hundreds of millions of users inspire creators outside the U.S. to focus on platforms Americans can use? If so, will TikTok start to lose even more content? The entire situation is unprecedented, so we really will just have to see.
In any case, to make sure you can always access your favorite TikTok content, even if the app is no longer accessible or safe to use, download your videos right now.
This article was updated Thursday, Jan. 23 with new updates about the TikTok ban, as well as news about APK Mirror.