Apple Inc. and Google LLC late Thursday returned TikTok to their respective app stores following a nearly month-long suspension.

The social media platform’s app store listings were removed on Jan. 19 in response to a law the Congress passed last April. The legislation requires TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. to find a buyer for the app or face a ban. The company has not yet agreed to a sale.

The day Apple and Google removed TikTok from their marketplaces, the app itself briefly shut down. Service was restored after President Donald Trump signed an executive order that delayed the TikTok ban for 75 days. However, the platform’s App Store and Google Play listings weren’t brought back until this week.

Without the app marketplace listings, consumers had no way of downloading TikTok. Existing users who had already installed the app lost access to updates.

Lawmakers passed last year’s sale-or-ban legislation over national security concerns about TikTok’s data collection practices and its ties to China. In mid-January, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law after finding the government’s arguments to be compelling. Two days after the ruling, the ban went into effect.

Citing analysts, Reuters reported that Apple and Google may have delayed restoring TikTok’s app store listings because they sought additional legal assurances from the Trump administration. Under the sale-or-ban law, app stores that host the service could be fined up to $5,000 per TikTok user. Given that the service has 175 million users in the US, the penalties could theoretically amount to billions of dollars. 

Apple and Google reportedly received the legal assurances they had sought in the form of a letter from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. According to NPR, the letter states that the U.S. Justice Department won’t prosecute the companies for distributing TikTok.

Legal experts have pointed out that Apple and Google could potentially still be liable to fines down the road. The penalties outlined in the sale-or-ban law have a statute of limitation of five years, one year beyond Trump’s term.

Shortly before its app store listings were restored on Thursday, TikTok rolled out a sideloading option for Android users. It enabled consumers to bypass Google Play and download the app directly from TikTok’s website. The company didn’t provide a similar option on iOS because Apple’s terms of service don’t permit sideloading.

After Trump’s 75-day suspension of the TikTok ban expires, the app could once again become unavailable in the U.S. Efforts are reportedly underway to prevent that from happening.

NPR reported that the White House is negotiating the sale of a majority sale in TikTok to a consortium of U.S. tech firms. The group reportedly includes Oracle Corp., which hosts some of TikTok’s backend infrastructure, and Microsoft Corp. If the sale materializes, Oracle would reportedly be tasked with overseeing the app’s content recommendation algorithm, data collection and software updates. 

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