APKMirror is no longer allowing downloads of TikTok, Lemon8, citing US Bill H.R.7521, setting a dangerous precedent for sideloading applications
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24607994
Currently, you are unable to view the APKMirror web page. Instead, you get the following message shown in the screenshot below.
Tiktok downloads are currently blocked in the United States due to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
The link in this statement leads to the following page, containing the bill that was passed:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521
This sets a dangerous precedent going forward for the Android community which sideloads applications onto their phones, being that APKMirror is the largest mirror of APKs for Android phones. It's also possible for them to add more apps to be included under this bill, and possible for another bill to be passed which may act as an even more broad blanket to target specific groups of people (e.g. LGBTQ+, people of color), messaging applications that are truly secure (e.g. Signal), and so on.
Then of course there a very real possibility of our president forcing the integration of software updates into both Android (and possibly even iOS smartphones) that can forcibly remove applications for the "sake of national security".
Blocked APKMirror links:
For some reason I can't edit my post, however I wanted to add that I attempted to post this to reddit under the /r/Android and /r/google subreddits, but Android is only mod approved posts, and the Google subreddit just straight up removed my post without even informing me.
Your first mistake was opening reddit at all.
You're right lol
One of the pinned posts is
They probably didn't want the spam of people posting 700 different articles all saying the exact same thing.
What's to stop Americans from simply not accessing the download link from the US (e.g. TOR, VPN)? Will it work if you side load and use it within the United States? Or do you have to run geolocated outside the US?
Most likely it will work with a VPN, yes. But having lived in America for so long, I never thought I would expect to have to use a VPN to access a website with content censored by our government.
Pretty sure americans have more reasons to use a VPN than europeans do.
Even if you're not using a VPN to visit blocked sites, there's still more reason for US citizens than Europeans to use it.
EU have privacy rights by default. US, not so much.
A VPN works
You can still get to it if you really want to, it's just harder. Like, someone can probably send you the APK over DM or through an email.
Edit: and I could be wrong, but that page looks like a CloudFlare page, so it's basically them blocking those pages, not an ISP or anything. APKmirrors could switch to a different CDN if they want to.
Is that the site blocking it? It looks more like the CDN is blocking the download.
I don't care enough to check if it's there, but there are other similar sites like APKPure.
VPN has entered the chat
Who cares? They were banned for good reason. Well no, that's not true, they were banned because they hurt Trump's feefees, but the pretend reason was true.