Phones With TikTok Are So Hot Even GameStop Is Buying Them
TikTok went dark in the United States last weekend for all of 14 hours before the app restored service. For some of the app’s 170 active members in the U.S. who kept the app on their phones, they were greeted with a celebratory message after President Donald Trump’s Inauguration and the ability to scroll to their hearts’ content once more. But the people who deleted the app haven’t been so lucky. While TikTok is once again usable, it hasn’t returned to U.S. app stores, like Google or Apple, leaving the downloaded application a coveted thing. And in both online and in-person marketplaces, sellers are trying to win big on people’s desire to scroll.
On eBay, a quick search for phones with TikTok reveals close to 20,000 offerings, with sales ranging from $510 to $25,000. That price tag might seem steep, but it’s incredibly difficult to prove that people are actually purchasing used phones at the listed prices. WIRED reported Wednesday that while sellers are swinging big, many of the auctions that have cashed out at prices in the thousands re-list their products directly after — meaning the sales could have fallen through. GameStop also announced on Thursday that locations would be accepting phones with TikTok downloaded. The company did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment but posted a link on X (formerly Twitter) where customers could calculate how much their old phones were worth. Based on that website, even a pristine, late-model iPhone would only net someone a couple hundred dollars.
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The seemingly lower prices that these devices are really selling for most likely stem from the difficulty of keeping an app on your phone while also keeping the seller’s data private — as well as the hope that TikTok could return to app stores sooner than people think. Most secondhand purchases of phones require a person to return the device to its factory settings, which prevents personal information from going to the purchaser. You can sign out of your Google or iCloud and keep the app on the phone, but anyone who signs in also has to make sure they don’t accidentally take the app off the phone while resyncing their data through a backup.
There’s no clear messaging from app stores about when TikTok will return. When Trump signed his executive order on Monday, it delayed the enforcement of the TikTok ban for 75 days, time the President has said he will use to convince TikTok to move to 50 percent U.S. ownership. “We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive,” TikTok said at the time. “It’s a strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship. We will work with President Trump on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States.” But the actual legislation that banned TikTok, which was signed into law by former President Joe Biden last spring, prevents tech companies from hosting TikTok in their app stores. So, even with Trump’s order, several members of Congress have said that companies will remain liable if they let the app return. Which means, for people who can’t wait 75 days to return to for-you-pages, coughing up a few hundred online for a secondhand phone might be the only answer for now.
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