US to ban TikTok and WeChat

Unless there’s some sort of approval of the Oracle and TikTok deal, the US will bring the hammer down on both TikTok and WeChat this Sunday.

Existing installations of TikTok will continue to work, but it’ll be removed the US Google Play and US Apple App Store. That means no new downloads and no updates in you’re in Russia the USA. There’s the possibility that TikTok will then be fully banned and removed from handsets on November 12th.

US President Donald Trump started a trade war many months ago against many Chinese tech companies, calling them “security threats”, and banning them from operating in the US or from working with US companies. We’ve already seen the damage that this has caused on the likes of Huawei and Honor. In this particular case, the Trump administration has stated that the collection of personal data to a Chinese datacentre is a “threat to national security” and wanted TikTok sold off to a US-based company.

In addition, WeChat will be dropped and made unavailable on Sunday too.