Apple Blocks US Users From Downloading ByteDance’s Chinese Apps | EUROtoday

“Pursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, apps developed by ByteDance Ltd. and its subsidiaries—including TikTok, CapCut, Lemon8, and others—will no longer be available for download or updates on the App Store for users in the United States starting January 19, 2025,” the archived webpage reads.

As of Thursday, ByteDance apps like TikTook, CapCut (a video editor app). and Lemon8 (an Instagram-like social media platform) stay accessible on the US App Store, as they’re coated by the January 22 deal to switch TikTook’s US enterprise to a gaggle of buyers led by Silver Lake, Oracle, and MGX. But the timing of the deal coincides with Apple’s determination to dam this different set of ByteDance apps from being downloaded.

An govt order issued in September by President Trump prolonged the deadline of the TikTook ban-or-divest regulation to January 23, 2026. A day earlier than that deadline, TikTook publicly introduced it had entered right into a deal, saying that “the safeguards provided by the Joint Venture will also cover CapCut, and Lemon8, and a portfolio of other apps and websites in the US.” But the announcement by no means explicitly elaborated on whether or not different ByteDance apps could be included within the switch. Just a few days later, folks began reporting they couldn’t obtain Douyin within the US.

Geoblocking Solution

The restrictions on downloading ByteDance apps within the US reveals how Apple is more and more utilizing technical restrictions to separate completely different regional variations of the App Store.

Traditionally, the first means Apple enforced geographic restrictions on iPhone apps was based on the nation the place a person registered their Apple ID. To have an Apple account registered in, say, China, an individual would sometimes must have a cellphone quantity, fee technique, and billing handle in China. But as soon as their account was registered, they may obtain apps designed for the Chinese market no matter the place they traveled.

In current years, nonetheless, Apple has been growing extra refined mechanisms to determine the place an App Store person is bodily situated. In 2023, the tech outlet 9to5Mac reported that Apple gadgets had created a brand new system known as “countryd” to exactly decide an individual’s location primarily based on “data such as current GPS location, country code from the Wi-Fi router, and information obtained from the SIM card.”

Observers theorized that the brand new system was created in response to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, which went into impact in 2024 and required Apple to start permitting folks within the EU to obtain apps from third-party app marketplaces. Apple complied with the EU regulation, nevertheless it restricted the accessibility of other app shops solely to folks bodily within the territory of the EU.

The precise mechanism Apple makes use of to allow geoblocking of iPhone apps is unclear, says Friso Bostoen, assistant professor of regulation at Tilburg University who has studied the impact of EU laws on Apple. “Presumably, there’s some on-device processing saying, ‘Look, this phone is somewhere in the EU borders, so you get an eligibility green check mark.’” And if the gadget detects that an EU resident leaves the area for greater than 90 days, based on Apple’s coverage, that eligibility is withdrawn, Bostoen says.