Users with TikTok on their iPhone after Apple removed it from the app store should refrain from doing this major thing.

Phones with TikTok already downloaded are being listed for eye-watering sums as the social media platform remains absent from app stores.

Whether TikTok can be downloaded on a new phone depends on your device, as it’s currently removed from app stores. Details.

Phones are going for thousands of dollars on online storefronts after Apple and Google took down ByteDance platforms.

So, as this new Chinese AI app continues its ride atop Apple’s App Store, the question is whether it’s safe to install and use on your iPhone. And here there are some real parallels with TikTok. It’s not the app that’s the issue — it’s what the platform behind the app does with your data that matters.

During the outage, even users who had previously downloaded TikTok were unable to access the app. While service has since been restored, the app remains unavailable for download in U.S.-based app stores, leaving new users unable to access it.

The TikTok app is still not available in Google Play or the iPhone App Store despite Trump's order halting the ban. Here's what's happening.

This has two knock-on effects that are much longer term. First, we now know that a U.S. TikTok ban will be difficult to bypass if it comes back — and the same will be true for any other Chinese (or other) app banned in the same way. There are some options, as I reported over the weekend, but none of them are especially compelling.

This isn’t just about the TikTok precedent here. It’s about reciprocity, considering that China doesn’t allow products like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Meta AI. Apple Intelligence is also unavailable in China, as Apple has to partner with a local AI provider to release it. By the way, TikTok is also unavailable in China.

Suspicions were confirmed when it was discovered that popular Chinese AI DeepSeek sends a tremendous amount of user data to servers in China.

Unlike some chatbot rivals, the fact that DeepSeek is open source provides it with some level of protection. This means that anyone can run it on their computer and developers can tap into the API in a way that would be hard to restrict. But the DeepSeek app is still at risk.