According to Appfigures, the highest 5 free iPhone apps proper now within the U.S. are:
- ChatGPT
- JumpJumpVPN
- V2Box
- UpScrolled
- Threads
Yesterday, Apple blogger John Gruber of Daring Fireball posted the general hottest iPhone apps for all of 2025, and the highest 5 have been:
- ChatGPT
- Threads
- TikTookay
I’m not the primary particular person to level this out, however it’s not precisely a stretch to infer that the three apps which have all of the sudden squeezed in between ChatGPT and Threads are on the record due to dissatisfaction with TikTookay. Two are VPN apps, which might theoretically be used to entry TikTookay from a digital community in a rustic the place the U.S. model of TikTookay is pointless, and one, UpScrolled, is an Australian video and textual content sharing app that not too long ago went viral.
To refresh your reminiscence on what’s occurring with TikTookay, after years of attempting to drive Chinese-owned ByteDance to relinquish possession and let a U.S.-friendly purchaser take over, a authorized entity was created earlier this month that may take possession of TikTookay, with Adam Presser as its new CEO. This permits TikTookay to adjust to a brand new U.S. regulation primarily requiring TikTookay to be run by a U.S. firm or be banned.
But this entity, a fancy joint company enterprise answerable for U.S. operations for TikTookay, seems from the skin to be struggling to hold all the pieces so as, amid the handoff from TikTookay’s Singapore base of operations (U.S. TikTookay information was already largely housed within the U.S., so it’s not clear if this transition truly entails any giant, burdensome information transfers).
According to an X publish from TikTookay, the issue is that there’s been “a major infrastructure issue triggered by a power outage at one of our U.S. data center partner sites,” and there could also be varied glitches, service slowdowns, failures, and points with person metrics. Oracle has additional clarified that the TikTookay concern stems from a weather-related blackout at one in all its information facilities. Oracle owns 15 % of the brand new TikTookay U.S. enterprise.
The points TikTookay is referring to dovetail properly with the descriptions of issues described by customers likw movies that sit in assessment indefinitely, and posts that get low or zero view counts, typically regardless of excessive numbers for different engagement metrics like feedback or shares. Other basic points that match with a knowledge heart interruption embody a doable lack of analytics in TikTookay Studio, livestreamers apparently getting random messages saying they want to cease streaming instantly, and irrelevant search outcomes.
However, the hiccups at TikTookay are, at the least partly, being perceived because the technical penalties of a right-wing takeover. That’s partly as a result of that 15 % of TikTookay U.S. now held by Oracle is managed by the right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison, and the possession transition is in fact being shepherded alongside by the Trump Administration. And that’s not to point out the truth that the Biden-era push to ban TikTookay emerged amid paranoia that it was turning the youth into Maoist, Hamas-supporting terrorists.
But have the foundations on TikTookay tangibly modified? For all anybody is aware of, no. It has re-emerged prior to now few days that in some unspecified time in the future prior to now, new TikTookay CEO Adam Presser talked publicly about an idiosyncratic and clunky moderation observe round Israel—treating the phrase “Zionist” as hate speech if it carries damaging connotations. But this isn’t some new TikTookay coverage rolling out to coincide with the transition to U.S. possession (though, quite troublingly, at the least one reply on X from Grok strongly implies that it’s). It’s extra doubtless a part of a rule change round Zionism that apparently rolled out in 2024.
Gizmodo reached out to TikTookay’s U.S. three way partnership for clarification concerning the causes of the platform’s current issues. In a reply, we acquired hyperlinks to statements on X, together with the one from Oracle. We adopted up, particularly asking if any content material guidelines had been modified for the reason that possession transition. We will replace if we hear again.
Around Sunday, TikTookay customers began writing that they felt like their political posts have been being censored.
“TikTok has been under new leadership for like a day and I made a slideshow with posts from the ICE rally today and it immediately got out under review and is not being published,” wrote Bluesky person @pnwpolicyangel.bsky.social.
Instagram person erinmayequade wrote:
“TikTok is cooked. They won’t even post my last two videos — I can see them, but anyone else who goes to my profile won’t even see them. Overnight, our federal government has silenced and suppressed dissent [on] one of our largest platforms. Not just content, but everything from certain people.”
It can be company malpractice to roll out such insidious and restrictive insurance policies proper out of the gate like this, significantly amid the current backdrop of political upheaval. Once once more, TikTookay nonetheless has not commented on this hypothesis from a few of its customers.
But if it’s true that customers are flocking to different choices for political causes regardless of no arduous proof that the brand new TikTookay U.S. three way partnership has already begun some sort of crackdown on political speech, that additionally doesn’t essentially imply they’re misled. They may simply count on adjustments alongside the strains of what occurred at Twitter when Elon Musk took over. Content requirements there took a tough proper flip in a short time. So with that in thoughts, some TikTookay customers may simply be leaving preemptively on the first signal of an annoying glitch so as to keep away from enduring even worse adjustments that they understand to be on the horizon.
