“Pursuant to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, apps developed by ByteDance Ltd. and its subsidiaries—including TikTok, CapCut, Lemon8, and others—will no longer be available for download or updates on the App Store for users in the United States starting January 19, 2025,” the archived webpage reads.

As of Thursday, ByteDance apps like TikTok, CapCut (a video editor app). and Lemon8 (an Instagram-like social media platform) remain available on the US App Store, as they are covered by the January 22 deal to transfer TikTok’s US business to a group of investors led by Silver Lake, Oracle, and MGX. But the timing of the deal coincides with Apple’s decision to block this other set of ByteDance apps from being downloaded.

An executive order issued in September by President Trump extended the deadline of the TikTok ban-or-divest law to January 23, 2026. A day before that deadline, TikTok publicly announced it had entered into a deal, saying that “the safeguards provided by the Joint Venture will also cover CapCut, and Lemon8, and a portfolio of other apps and websites in the US.” But the announcement never explicitly elaborated on whether other ByteDance apps would be included in the transfer. A few days later, people started reporting they couldn’t download Douyin in the US.

Geoblocking Solution

The restrictions on downloading ByteDance apps in the US shows how Apple is increasingly using technical restrictions to separate different regional versions of the App Store.

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.

The exact mechanism Apple uses to enable geoblocking of iPhone apps is unclear, says Friso Bostoen, assistant professor of law at Tilburg University who has studied the effect of EU regulations on Apple. “Presumably, there’s some on-device processing saying, ‘Look, this phone is somewhere in the EU borders, so you get an eligibility green check mark.’” And if the device detects that an EU resident leaves the region for more than 90 days, according to Apple’s policy, that eligibility is withdrawn, Bostoen says.