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eBay sells used phones with TikTok installed
The social media app has disappeared from all US app stores
January 23rd, 2025
The second-hand market is a bubble of endless possibilities, even in the face of drama. You can sell and buy everything, even things that were in your country, like TikTok. Although the ban on the Chinese social media by the United States was scheduled for last week, after a few hours of prohibition, newly-elected president Donald Trump announced that he would restore Americans' ability to use TikTok - «I tell you what. Every rich person has called me about TikTok,» he said in an interview at the Oval Office - for 75 days. However, the delay of the ban has not given U.S. users the ability to download the app from app stores, so some clever sellers on eBay have already started a new business: selling used phones on which TikTok has been downloaded. With all the uproar caused in the past month about the social media platform, it's understandable that more and more people hearing about it want to discover the secret behind the app's success; it would not be surprising to learn that TikTok is experiencing a boom in registrations these days, precisely in the country that wanted to eliminate it.
At the moment, no U.S. app store has TikTok, and neither Google nor Apple has released any statements about what will happen. The inability to download the app is worrying users, especially social media managers and content creators: if TikTok is accidentally deleted, the phone is lost, or a new device is purchased, there is no way to get it back. For eBay sellers, the situation represents an unparalleled opportunity: the platform currently features thousands of listings of used phones, of all brands, with TikTok installed. To ensure the app is not lost, the seller abandons the iCloud or Google account associated with the phone but does not reset the device to factory settings; this way, the app remains installed unless the buyer makes the mistake of performing a backup. The starting price chosen by sellers is extremely high, ranging from $2,000 to $50,000, but there is no certainty that anyone has truly decided to invest so much in one of these used but ultra-expensive phones.
We don’t know at what price, but eBay shows that several phones with TikTok have been sold, with the note “best offer accepted”, although many of these are followed by re-listings, which could mean that the sale was not truly completed. Despite the executive order signed by Trump, the future of TikTok in the United States is still undecided: the "rescue" of the app has granted ByteDance 75 more days to decide whether to sell the social media platform to an American competitor or to abandon the U.S. market forever. While announcing the new order, Trump emphasized how owning TikTok could benefit the country's economy, and to convince ByteDance to sell, he proposed the group sell only 50% of the app's capital.