How to get TikTok back on your phone if you deleted it after the ban
Source: The Verge
TikTok’s app is still working for people in the US — as long as it’s already on their phone. While the service quickly returned after the brief shutdown in January, the app itself is no longer available on either Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store. That means that if you removed the app, never had it downloaded in the first place, or are setting up a new phone from scratch, you’ll have to jump through some hoops to get access.
Currently, there are a few options for people who want to access TikTok on their phones and don’t have the app already. If you’ve got an Android device, you can download the app directly from TikTok’s site and adjust a few settings on your phone to get it installed. But if you’ve got an iPhone, your options are more limited — and a lot more difficult to work around. We cover all of these below.
You can now download the TikTok app directly from the company’s website, although not from the Google Play Store.
- Go to tiktok.com on your computer. You’ll see a QR code — scan it with your phone.
- Alternatively, you can visit this link directly from your phone: tiktok.com/download.
- You’ll get a choice of TikTok Lite (a smaller version that takes up 34.3MB) and TikTok (409MB). The Lite version is meant for older, slower phones and for use with slower internet connections. Select which one you want to download.
- Once the download is done and you’ve selected Open, you may get a notice telling you that your phone isn’t allowed to install unknown apps and that you have to change that in Settings. There will be a link to your Settings in the notice; tap it.
- Toggle Allow from this source on.
- You’ll then be asked, “Do you want to install this app?” Tap Install. When it’s done, you can open it and log in.
- If you want to be safe from other outside apps being installed on your phone, you can go back into Settings > Apps > Special app access > Install unknown apps > Chrome and toggle Allow from this source off.
Keep in mind that if you’re at all nervous about downloading apps from outside the Play Store, you can still access TikTok using your browser. Just follow the directions for an iOS device below.
If you’re on an iOS device that does not already have the TikTok app, you can only get TikTok via your web browser. (You can also try using a VPN, but I’ll deal with that in a minute.)
You’re also out of luck if you have a new iPhone and tried to transfer your existing TikTok app over from your previous phone — according to Apple’s support page, the apps “can’t be redownloaded if deleted or restored if you move to a new device.” (TikTok has a good number of videos expressing the frustration of new iPhone owners.)
You can, however, still access TikTok on a browser. If you visit tiktok.com, you can access your feed, watch videos, see and add comments, and add new favorites. You can even add an icon to your homescreen to access it like a proper app. (You’ll be invited to do that the first time you sign in, or you can do it via Safari’s Share button.)
However, whether I used TikTok in Safari or Chrome on an iPhone, I found I was unable to create a video. Every time I tried, I got a notice that the site was trying to open another app (my iPhone’s camera), and when I hit Allow, it tried to go to the App Store to download the nonexistent TikTok app.
This is not even mentioning the frustration of the constant pop-ups and nudges telling me that I could “Get the full app experience” by downloading the app — which, of course, wasn’t available to download.
When TikTok initially disappeared, one of the main suggestions (besides moving to a different app) was to use a VPN to “fool” your phone or computer into thinking that you weren’t in the US. And if you’re a TikTok creator who uses an iPhone, you don’t seem to have many other alternatives right now, short of finding an iPhone that still has a working app or going Android.
Apple has a lot of checks in place to make sure users are visiting the correct region’s App Store. Getting around that involves jumping through quite a few hoops and ultimately may not work out — it’s a lot more work than simply downloading a VPN and setting your location to somewhere outside the US.
I haven’t tried the VPN method myself, but people who claim to have fooled the App Store have had to take quite a few steps:
- Create a new Apple ID with a phone number from another country using a service such as Google Voice, OpenPhone, or Hushed.
- Find and install a VPN that can identify you as coming from that country. There are a variety of VPNs available; two that have been recommended to me by colleagues are NordVPN and Proton VPN.
- Set your phone’s region to match the region on your VPN.
- Obtain a valid payment method with a valid billing address for the country you’re pretending to be in.
It is not a simple or foolproof process, and a few friends have told me that they tried it and hit a wall somewhere along the line.
