We're enhancing ways for our community to continue using TikTok by making Android Package Kits available at TikTok.com/download so that our U.S. Android users can download our app and create, discover, and connect on TikTok.
Via John Gruber:
I suspect something is going to give on this standoff. Either (a) China relents and actually sells to a U.S. company, and TikTok comes back to the App Store and Play Store; or (b) Trump's extralegal extension expires with no sale and Oracle and Akamai are forced to pull the plug on ByteDance's cloud services in the US.
[...]
If I'm wrong and TikTok remains in this half-zombie state in the US -- unavailable in the App Store or Play Store, but operational if you have the app installed on your phone -- it'll be interesting if TikTok is the app that makes the mass market actually care about the lack of sideloading on iOS. It'll be interesting too if sideloading on Android goes mainstream because of this.
Does app vs. Web make that much difference if you're just consuming the videos?