Could Trump Be Considering a Revised TikTok Global Deal From 2020?

Donald Trump is president again, as of today! And in tech, among the most immediately affected will be viewers of the long-running drama “TikTok—Ban or Not?”. Trump on Sunday promised to renew the series for an expected three months. So far, Apple and Google don’t appear to be sticking around for the new season. While cloud service Oracle turned TikTok back on after a nearly 12-hour outage Sunday, the app remains unavailable in the Google and Apple mobile app stores. 

That could change, once Trump issues the TikTok executive order he has promised. Still, even if TikTok remains banned from the app stores, it may not matter too much. In the near term, the app’s absence from app stores only affects those who don’t already have TikTok on their phones. Long term, existing users could find the app becoming glitchy, as it won’t be able to get updates. And if people change phones, they won’t be able to get TikTok on the new device. Still, by the time those issues become evident to many people, Trump’s extension of the deadline will likely be up.