Apple and Google recovered to their American app stores on Thursday evening, a few weeks after they had removed the video platform from Chinese ownership to meet a new law that forbade it in the country.
Last month, President Trump tried to pause the enforcement of the tap ban with an executive order. But Apple and Google were reluctant to bring Tiktok back until they were sure that they were not breaking the law.
Apple and Google had recently received letters from the Ministry of Justice who assure them that they would not receive fines for wearing taps in their app stores, said that two people with knowledge of communication, who were not authorized to speak publicly . The executive order that Mr Trump signed last month asked that “written guidance” was sent.
The law, signed last year by President Joseph R. Biden, had called for the parent company of Tiktok, Bytedance, to sell the app to a non-Chinese owner on January 19. Federal legislators were concerned that the Chinese ties of Tiktok made a national security threat. The law focused on App Store operators and internet hosting companies with steep financial fines if they have distributed or maintained Tiktok.
The Executive Order of Mr Trump, who told the Ministry of Justice to enforce the law for 75 days, while his administration pursued a resolution, led to confusion among technology companies. While Apple and Google Tiktok kept out of their app stores, companies such as Oracle, which offered back-end technology support for the app, resumed collaboration after a short closure in January.
Apple and Google have not commented than saying that they had restored the app. Tiktok and a spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice refused to comment.
The return from Tiktok to the app stores means that it is now back to work, as always in the United States. This has asked questions about whether Mr Trump is complying with the rule of law or first places power -like power, whereby some experts say that conflict represents the start of a constitutional crisis. The Supreme Court unanimously maintained the law last month.
“If we get 75 days without a deal and Trump says we will not continue to maintain it, we will be very much in a crisis,” says Lindsay Gorman, the director of the technology program in Marshall Fund, Germany and a former technical adviser for the Biden Administration. “Then we get bigger problems than just about Tiktok, but about the relationship between the executive and legislative branches.”
On Thursday, Mr. Trump suggested that he could extend his non -enforcement of the law that Tiktok prohibits.
“I have 90 days from about two weeks ago, and I am sure it can be extended, but let's look,” he said, and seemed to be the time period in his executive order. “We have many people who are interested in Tiktok.”
Legislers and intelligence officers have long argued that bytedance could hand over sensitive American user data – such as location – information – to Beijing. They have also claimed that China could use Tiktok's contents recommendations to feed wrong information.
Tiktok rejected such concerns and said there was no public evidence that both situation had taken place in the United States.
Since the law came into effect last month, Tiktok – who claims that 170 million American users – has remained largely unaffected on American phones that the app had already downloaded. Yet some Tiktokmakers complained about glitches that they believed they were bound to the absence of the app in app shops. This includes problems with live streaming and digital coins on Tiktok that users can buy and give it to makers who like them.
Mr. Trump promised to save Tiktok during his campaign and said that he will help to orchestrate a deal for the company that will keep it in the United States. But it is unclear how his administration will do that under the limitations of the law, which requires a sale and says that a person or people in China cannot keep directly or indirectly, more than 20 percent of Tiktok.
Bytedance has said for years that it cannot sell the app, partly because the Chinese government would not allow the export of the most important algorithm of Tiktok.
On Tuesday, Tiktok -managers made makers in a briefing call that it was optimistic that Apple and Google would recover the app quickly, said H. Lee Justine, a Tiktokmaker and author, who was at the call.
“They said the administration had given them a lot of information that they would not be punished and that they were really hopeful that they would now put it back in the app -stores,” she said in an interview. “It makes me very hopeful that they had the feeling that they could do this, because hopefully this means that there will be no problems in the long term and this will work.”
David McCabe contributed reporting.
