While TikTok operates in the United States under new ownership, Apple has deployed technical restrictions to block iOS users in the United States from downloading other apps made by the video platform’s Chinese parent organization ByteDance.
ByteDance owns a vast array of different apps spanning social media, entertainment, artificial intelligence, and other sectors. The leading one is Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which has over 1 billion monthly active users. While most of those users reside in China, iPhone owners around the world have traditionally been able to download these apps from anywhere without using a VPN, as long as they have a valid App Store account registered in China.
That’s not true anymore. Starting in late January, iPhone users in the US with Chinese App Store accounts began reporting that they were encountering new obstacles when they tried to download apps developed by ByteDance. WIRED has confirmed that even with a valid Chinese App Store account, downloading or updating a ByteDance-owned Chinese app is blocked on Apple devices located in the United States.
Instead, a pop-up window appears that says, “This app is unavailable in the country or region you’re in.” The restriction appears to apply only to ByteDance-owned apps and not those developed by other Chinese companies.
Apple and ByteDance declined to comment. TikTok USDS Joint Venture (the new entity controlling TikTok’s US operations) didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
The timing and technical specifics suggest the restriction is related to the deal TikTok agreed to in January to divest Chinese ownership of its US operations. The agreement was the result of the so-called TikTok ban law passed by Congress in 2024, which also barred companies like Apple and Google from distributing other apps majority-owned by ByteDance. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act states that no company can “distribute, maintain, or update” any app majority-controlled by ByteDance “within the land or maritime borders of the United States.”
The law was primarily aimed at TikTok, which has more than 100 million users in the US and had been the subject of years of debate in Washington over whether its Chinese ownership posed a national security risk. But ByteDance also has dozens of other apps that at some point were also removed from Apple’s and Google’s app stores in the US. Now it seems like the scope of impact has reached even more apps that are not technically designed for US audiences, such as Douyin, the AI chatbot Doubao, and the fiction reading platform Fanqie Novel.
WIRED collected dozens of user reports on Chinese social media from people either living in or traveling to the US who said they had been blocked from downloading or updating popular ByteDance-owned apps. These apps are also not available on the Google Play Store, but it’s less of a concern for Android users as their devices have fewer restrictions on downloading apps from non-Google sources.
Traditionally, the primary way Apple enforced geographic restrictions on iPhone apps was according to the country where a user registered their Apple ID. To have an Apple account registered in, say, China, a person would typically need to have a phone number, payment method, and billing address in China. But once their account was registered, they could download apps designed for the Chinese market regardless of where they traveled.
In recent years, however, Apple has been developing more sophisticated mechanisms to identify where an App Store user is physically located. In 2023, the tech outlet 9to5Mac reported that Apple devices had created a new system called “countryd” to precisely determine a person’s location 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 new system was created in response to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, which went into effect in 2024 and required Apple to begin allowing people in the EU to download apps from third-party app marketplaces. Apple complied with the EU regulation, but it restricted the accessibility of alternative app stores only to people physically in the territory of the EU.