The TikTok ban has been a subject of much debate in America! When the ban date came and went this January, people were relieved to have it ‘back’ and simultaneously peeved it went offline at all if it was going to come back a mere twelve hours later. But this whole event has been irregular for how app bans normally go. Of course, apps don’t normally get banned by the government in the US, but app stores choose to discontinue apps all the time, which is how we’d all know what happens normally. For example, Flappy Bird – the app was pulled from the store right before it got super popular, and people were selling phones with the app downloaded for a much higher price than the phone was worth new!
Firstly, the ban was not actually demanding TikTok fully stop service and deny access to American users like it did for those twelve hours. The ban told Apple and Google to pull it from their app stores, and not much more. However, users were notified with a popup that the app would not be available when the time came, and then the app would force-close. Ordinarily, apps don’t force the user out! It’s super inconvenient for everyone if the app doesn’t let the user close their profile down – inactive accounts bother a company for a number of reasons, and users don’t like having data floating around outside their control in this day and age. Even non-social apps that have been removed generally won’t force the app to close.
So, ordinarily, a removed app would still be functional, at least for a little while. What normally craters removed apps are the slow, inexorable march of system updates gradually introducing bugs, up until the service stops working altogether. Without the app store, users would have to manually download updates from third party sites, something most phones won’t accommodate. It’s tougher to infect a phone with a virus not only because the OS is totally different from the OS on a desktop computer, but because it is written to be difficult to touch the source code. It’s possible to totally brick a phone by, say, accidentally disabling the touchscreen, for example, so you can’t just ‘turn it off’ the way you could unplug a keyboard or monitor and still have a working PC. It would require something called ‘jailbreaking’, which is not an option for phones on contract because it voids warranties and introduces unnecessary risk even for people who own their phones outright.
So, lacking the ability to update the app, the app goes dark, slowly, even if the servers providing content to it stay active. However, less complex apps that draw less from system resources tend to live longer without support.
