According to Appfigures, the top five free iPhone apps right now in the U.S. are:
- ChatGPT
- JumpJumpVPN
- V2Box
- UpScrolled
- Threads
Yesterday, Apple blogger John Gruber of Daring Fireball posted the overall most popular iPhone apps for all of 2025, and the top five were:
- ChatGPT
- Threads
- TikTok
I’m not the first person to point this out, but it’s not exactly a stretch to infer that the three apps that have suddenly squeezed in between ChatGPT and Threads are on the list due to dissatisfaction with TikTok. Two are VPN apps, which can theoretically be used to access TikTok from a virtual network in a country where the U.S. version of TikTok is unnecessary, and one, UpScrolled, is an Australian video and text sharing app that recently went viral.
To refresh your memory on what’s going on with TikTok, after years of trying to force Chinese-owned ByteDance to relinquish ownership and let a U.S.-friendly buyer take over, a legal entity was created earlier this month that can take ownership of TikTok, with Adam Presser as its new CEO. This allows TikTok to comply with a new U.S. law essentially requiring TikTok to be run by a U.S. company or be banned.
But this entity, a complex joint corporate venture in charge of U.S. operations for TikTok, appears from the outside to be struggling to keep everything in order, amid the handoff from TikTok’s Singapore base of operations (U.S. TikTok data was already largely housed in the U.S., so it’s not clear if this transition actually involves any large, burdensome data transfers).
According to an X post from TikTok, the problem 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 may be various glitches, service slowdowns, failures, and issues with user metrics. Oracle has further clarified that the TikTok issue stems from a weather-related blackout at one of its data centers. Oracle owns 15 percent of the new TikTok U.S. venture.
The issues TikTok is referring to dovetail nicely with the descriptions of problems described by users likw videos that sit in review indefinitely, and posts that get low or zero view counts, often despite high numbers for other engagement metrics like comments or shares. Other general issues that fit with a data center interruption include a possible lack of analytics in TikTok Studio, livestreamers apparently getting random messages saying they need to stop streaming immediately, and irrelevant search results.
However, the hiccups at TikTok are, at least in part, being perceived as the technical consequences of a right-wing takeover. That’s in part because that 15 percent of TikTok U.S. now held by Oracle is controlled by the right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison, and the ownership transition is of course being shepherded along by the Trump Administration. And that’s not to mention the fact that the Biden-era push to ban TikTok emerged amid paranoia that it was turning the youth into Maoist, Hamas-supporting terrorists.
But have the rules on TikTok tangibly changed? For all anyone knows, no. It has re-emerged in the past few days that at some point in the past, new TikTok CEO Adam Presser talked publicly about an idiosyncratic and clunky moderation practice around Israel—treating the word “Zionist” as hate speech if it carries negative connotations. But this isn’t some new TikTok policy rolling out to coincide with the transition to U.S. ownership (although, rather troublingly, at least one answer on X from Grok strongly implies that it is). It’s more likely part of a rule change around Zionism that apparently rolled out in 2024.
Gizmodo reached out to TikTok’s U.S. joint venture for clarification about the causes of the platform’s recent problems. In a reply, we received links to statements on X, including the one from Oracle. We followed up, specifically asking if any content rules had been changed since the ownership transition. We will update if we hear back.
Around Sunday, TikTok users started writing that they felt like their political posts were 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 user @pnwpolicyangel.bsky.social.
Instagram user 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 would be corporate malpractice to roll out such insidious and restrictive policies right out of the gate like this, particularly amid the present backdrop of political upheaval. Once again, TikTok still has not commented on this speculation from some of its users.
But if it’s true that users are flocking to other options for political reasons despite no hard evidence that the new TikTok U.S. joint venture has already begun some kind of crackdown on political speech, that also doesn’t necessarily mean they’re misled. They might just expect changes along the lines of what happened at Twitter when Elon Musk took over. Content standards there took a hard right turn very quickly. So with that in mind, some TikTok users might just be leaving preemptively at the first sign of an annoying glitch in order to avoid enduring even worse changes that they perceive to be on the horizon.
