Will TikTok Be Removed From Phones in New York?

With a looming TikTok ban will the popular social media app vanish from your phone?

Are you someone who uses TikTok? Whether it's to create videos or just watch your favorite creators and share those videos with your friends TikTok has become one of the largest social media platforms in the world. For the United States, that could be coming to an end.

As of January 19th TikTok will have a federal ban unless it is sold to a company that is not owned by China. The fear is that the Chinese government uses TikTok to spy on us and take information from our phones. They believe TikTok is a security risk.

Right now officials have told both Apple and Google they need to be prepared to remove TikTok from their app stores on January 19th after a federal appeals court upheld a law that would require ByteDance, TikTok's parents company, to divest in it by January 19th or the app will be banned.

So what does a ban mean in New York?

It means the same thing that it means everywhere else. TikTok will not be supported by app stores and eventually the app would not function because the app would become outdated without the proper updates.

Will the app be removed or just vanish from your phone? No. If you already have the app installed on your phone it will remain there. You just won't be able to download it in the app store anymore. So if you don't have it, you will be out of luck.

There is still a chance for the app to avoid a ban if ByteDance sells, but that is not looking likely at this time.