Last week took us by surprise not only with the good weather but also with some promising updates regarding the ongoing TikTok saga.

The app is doing very well in Europe, which accounts for over 100 million of its 690 million monthly users worldwide. But on the other side of the world – it’s not so rosy…

Last week we thought we could say farewell to TikTok in the US as American authorities were about to place detrimental limitations on the application.

Trump claimed that the $50 billion app, TikTok is a national security threat. The officials fear that data collected by TikTok’s owners may be handed to the Chinese government, therefore, a ban would be put in place.

The new ban wouldn’t allow new app downloads or let the company do any updates, including fixing the bugs.

Although this announcement didn’t mean a complete boycott of the app, the imposed limitations would deteriorate the app and degrade its usability. With no updates, it eventually would become slow and bug infected.

But surprise, surprise – just a few days later, it was announced that a deal between TikTok and President Trump has been approved. TikTok will establish a new company – TikTok Global.

The new corporation will be controlled by Oracle and Walmart where both companies will acquire stakes – Oracle will take 12.5%, while Walmart will take 7.5%. The new establishment will allow the app to continue to operate in the US market as all of its data will be stored by Oracle instead of the Chinese company.

So why did Trump change his mind? This deal isn’t quite what he was after. Initially, he demanded an outright sale of TikTok to a US company.

Trump explained that the new deal satisfies the security requirements and will provide 25,000 new jobs, and with unemployment being a growing problem, this is a good deal.

WeChat, however, is facing more severe restrictions from Sunday last week. Not only will the app experience a slower service and won’t allow any money transfers of payment processing for users in the US, WeChat is no longer available in US app stores.

Even though Trump has approved the proposed deal, we are still waiting on the Chinese government to sign this too, until then, nothing is certain and the deal could easily fall through.

If the deal does fall through, what will happen then? Would people just lose the entertaining platform? Well, it seems like the outcome in this scenario wouldn’t be too far from what the government initially aimed for.

 

Giff: YouTube

We will have an alternative – TikTok’s new rival YouTube Shorts.

This new YouTube app has some potential. It will be much like TikTok but have some additional features that serve as a great USP.

Similarly to TikTok, YouTube Shorts will allow its users to upload 15-second videos using a variety of creative tools. What’s different here is that YouTube will be adding its main feature – access to an expanding music library. Furthermore, it plans to work with music artists, labels, and publishers to enable users to access their content on YouTube Shorts. Having said that, could the application succeed TikTok?

In concussion, users won’t be left empty-handed. Whether TikTok remains in the US or not, there will always be another app where people can express their creativity and businesses connect to their audiences.