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Second hand phones with TikTok installed are listed on eBay for thousands of dollars. And it looks like some people might actually buy it.
Despite the fact that US President Donald Trump signed a executive order on Monday delaying any potential ban on the social media app for 75 days, TikTok remains absent from all US app stores, with Apple and Google giving no hints about a return. This means if you’re in America and you delete the app or lose your phone, you’re currently locked out, with no way to download it again. For content creators, brand marketers and social media managers, that could spell disaster. And expensive at that.
Opportunistic eBayers seized the opportunity to cash in on this misfortune. A quick search for “TikTok phone” brings up over 9,000 used listings smartphones from the likes of Apple and Samsung, all with the TikTok app already installed.
This is made possible by the seller signing out of the iCloud or Google account associated with the device instead of erasing the phone in factory settings. Any buyer should therefore be careful not to sync with an existing cloud backup, to avoid losing the app they paid so much to get.
Some of these phones are listed for as much $50,000 under eBay’s Buy It Now sales format, but it’s hard to believe that anyone could actually think their phone would sell for that, and there’s no sign that they have.
There are many more listed in the $2,000 to $5,000 range, but as to whether anyone will actually buy them at this price, it still seems unlikely.
What can be said is that, despite the inflated prices, there is is it interest These phones i am sell, but for exactly how much is more difficult to establish. Select the “sold” filter on the eBay search and there are many sales that appear to be complete, but almost all of them have a “best offer accepted” note attached to them.
Every auction that ended with incredibly inflated prices seems to have been put back up for sale shortly after, suggesting an unsuccessful sale, with only those close to market value for second-hand phones looking to actually be sold.
A quick look at the auctions that are currently underway also shows much more reasonable prices than an initial search might suggest.
The true impact of any TikTok premium is a bit unclear, then, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. Results for the mobile search term TikTok have increased by more than 2,000 articles at the time of writing – a sense of urgency no doubt driven by the fact that the app could be returning to app stores in every moment.
At the moment, a TikTok search in any app store is met with statements from Google and Apple that cite legal requirements as the reason the app is not available in their stores. This is despite Trump’s executive order clearly directing the Department of Justice to “take no action to enforce the Act or impose any penalty against any entity for any failure to comply with the Act.”
Whether TikTok will reappear before the 75 days remains to be seen – as with any deal Trump has made in the meantime – but those exiled are not completely without options. this week, thousands of users they arrived at another Chinese-owned social networking platform, RedNote, leaving the app scrambling hire English moderators.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has also done its part to take lost TikTokers under its wing by introducing a flurry of new family duties and also offer great influencers as much $5,000 to join their platforms.
