“Pursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, applications developed by ByteDance Ltd. and its subsidiaries – including TikTok, CapCut, Lemon8 and others – will no longer be available for download or update on the App Store for users in the United States effective January 19, 2025.” – we read on the archived website.
As of Thursday, ByteDance apps like TikTok, CapCut (video editing app). and Lemon8 (an Instagram-like social media platform) remain available in the US App Store as they are included in the January 22 deal to transfer TikTok’s US operations to a group of investors led by Silver Lake, Oracle and MGX. However, the timing of the deal coincides with Apple’s decision to block downloads of another set of ByteDance apps.
Some executive order issued in September by President Trump extended the deadline for the TikTok Prohibition or Divestment Act to January 23, 2026. The day before that deadline, TikTok publicly announced that he had entered into an agreementstating that “the security measures provided by the Joint Venture will also cover CapCut and Lemon8, as well as a number of other U.S. applications and websites.” However, the announcement never made it clear whether other ByteDance apps would be included in the transfer. A few days later, people started reporting that they were unable to download Douyin in the US.
Geo-blocking solution
The ByteDance app download restrictions in the US show how Apple is increasingly using technical restrictions to separate different regional versions of the App Store.
Traditionally, Apple’s main way of enforcing geo-restrictions in iPhone apps has been to depend on the country in which a user registered their Apple ID. To have an Apple account registered in China, for example, you usually need to have a phone number, payment method, and billing address in China. However, once they registered an account, they could download Chinese-market apps regardless of where they traveled.
However, in recent years, Apple has been developing more sophisticated mechanisms for identifying where an App Store user is physically located. In 2023, technology outlet 9to5Mac reported it Apple devices have created a fresh system called “countryd” that allows you to precisely determine a person’s location based on “data such as the current GPS location, the country code from the Wi-Fi router, and information obtained from the SIM card.”
Observers theorized that the fresh system was created in response to the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which came into force in 2024 and required Apple to allow EU citizens to download apps from third-party app markets. Apple complied with the EU regulation, but it constrained the availability of alternative app stores only to people physically present in the EU.
The exact mechanism Apple uses to enable geoblocking of iPhone apps is unclear, says Friso Bostoen, an assistant professor of law at Tilburg University who has studied the impact of EU regulations on Apple. “Probably the on-device processing says, ‘Look, this phone is somewhere on the EU borders, so there’s a green eligibility checkmark’.” And if the device detects that an EU resident leaves the region for more than 90 days, according to Apple policyeligibility is withdrawn, Bostoen claims.