The White House is negotiating to transfer the control of TikTok to Oracle, allowing the app to be released from the ban.

The Chinese version of the TikTok application is currently not available on the US App Store for iPhones, as the company failed to sell itself to an American owner before the recent flag came into effect.

However, it seems that negotiations are underway to transfer control of TikTok to a new owner, allowing it to return to the App Store. There is no agreement ready to be concluded yet.

NPR reports that the White House is directly involved in the negotiations for which Oracle and an external investor group would take control of TikTok. The current owner, ByteDance, would remain with a smaller stake.

Significantly, it seems that this transaction would lead to most of TikTok's global operations being under US dominance rather than TikTok splitting into independent businesses based in the US and not the US.

Oracle is already intimately familiar with TikTok and has shown previous interest in a collaboration. The cloud giant provides the fundamental web infrastructure for TikTok's backend, and four years ago — under the previous Trump presidency — it was in talks to acquire TikTok as part of a partnership with Walmart.

The detailed financial determination is a major obstacle. It is said that TikTok is seeking a valuation in the hundreds of billions of dollars, a figure that almost no company can gather on its own as capital. Trump had previously indicated that the government itself might take a stake, making TikTok partially nationalized. However, it is uncertain whether this is currently a serious proposal.

Nonetheless, here is the current status of what is happening now.

For users of the popular photo-based video social media app in the US, if the app has already been downloaded to your phone, iPhone or Android, it works normally. However, since it is not available on the App Store, the app cannot be updated and, if deleted, cannot be reinstalled. This means that anyone who buys a new phone will not be able to get TikTok on it.

TikTok remains freely available in all other geographical regions.