TikTok remains on schedule to be banned in the U.S. beginning Jan. 19, one day before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
In high-pressure hearings on Jan. 10, the Supreme Court appeared likely to rule in favor of the ban.
But even if the ban does go into effect, TikTok will not disappear from users’ phones. In fact, it will remain legal to open and use the app. People who have already downloaded TikTok will be able to post and watch videos just as they did before.
Instead, the ban — passed in April 2024 with bipartisan support in Congress and signed by President Biden — targets popular app stores. TikTok will in all likelihood be removed from Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store, making it extremely hard to download in the U.S.
Additionally, people who have already downloaded TikTok will be unable to update the app, meaning it will likely slowly decay and eventually become unusable.
People with technological knowledge and skills will still have ways of accessing the app. Anyone using third-party app stores on Android devices or “jailbroken” iPhones will be able to download and update TikTok. However, such workarounds also come with security and malware risks.
Otherwise, people could access TikTok through VPNs, which allow internet users to mask their location. VPNs are often used by people in countries with internet restrictions to get around firewalls.
But the extra barriers to access and a degrading app experience will likely see people leave TikTok as it dies a slow death. Experts say the law banning TikTok was not crafted to make accessing the app impossible but rather to make it more difficult.
Though Trump could publicly direct the Justice Department to ignore the ban, Apple and Google would still be taking major legal and financial risks if they continued to offer the app. The law calls for a fine of $5,000 per user, which could create hundreds of billions in penalties if Trump were to change his mind.
