In case you've been living under a rock, TikTok is a short-form video app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. Launching in 2016, it quickly rose to popularity, eventually becoming one of the most-downloaded apps in the U.S. by 2018.

TikTok is facing a fresh European Union privacy investigation into user data transferred to China. The Irish Data Protection Commission opened the inquiry as a follow up to a previous investigation that ended earlier this year with a 530 million euro ($620 million) fine.

TikTok is developing a new app for its more than 170 million U.S. users alongside a potential sale, according to a report from The Information. The news follows comments President Donald Trump made on Friday that he “pretty much” has a deal for a U.S. company to purchase TikTok’s U.S. operations, although he did not disclose the potential buyer.

TikTok's owner, ByteDance, has plans to move Americans to a US-specific version of CapCut as it looks to meet requirements for a divest-or-ban law.

According to new reporting from The Information, TikTok is building a new app ahead of a sale to non-Chinese investors. American users will need to download the new app, which will replace the existing TikTok app in the United States.

Popular video-sharing app TikTok is still available to US users only because President Trump issued an executive order in early 2025 to postpone the ban the Chinese app is facing. Trump has extended the delay two more times since then, with the latest extension coming just a few weeks ago.

The TikTok US-only app strategy centers on creating an independent recommendation system that would operate entirely apart from ByteDance’s global infrastructure. The new app is expected to use only data from US users to train its recommendation algorithms, further distancing it from TikTok’s global systems, according to the SCMP report.

From Larry Ellison’s new power consolidation to an app that simply may not be as good, the key variables as a multiyear saga could finally be ending.