2020 will be a year remembered for many things, including the bellicoseness of the US administration against everything that comes from China. We've seen how all Huawei's technology has been vetoed and in recent weeks we also saw how it forced the Tik Tok social network to sell at least part of the company to some American company.
The Asian firm had until September 15 to close an agreement and, although there seemed to be an approach to Oracle, at no point did it become official. This has led to the U.S. government's announcement that as of September 20, all American companies will have to remove both that app and Wechat from their app stores.
No new downloads or updates from Wechat and Tik Tok
When both apps are removed from the world's most relevant stories, the AppStore and Google Play Store, U.S. users will not be able to install or update apps that are already installed on that country's mobiles for the first time.
This can be a push for Reels, Instagram's feature designed to mimic Tik Tok.
At the moment this movement seems to be limited to downloads in the United States, but at this point, we would not be surprised to find out that the US government is vetoing these applications internationally, just as not allowed Huawei to collaborate with Google anywhere in the world.
Byte Dance, the company that owns Tik Tok, is still in negotiations with American companies to sell the US subsidiary, but the recommendation algorithm would not be included, one of the reasons why the social network has grown so much in recent months.