For about $ 1,000, you can leave an Apple store with a brand new, hermetically sealed iPhone that has been personalized for you by a verified genius.
Or, for hundreds or even thousands of dollars, you can buy a used phone with a cracked screen and speakers filled with dirt from someone on the internet.
It all depends just on how much you love Tiktok.
When the video exchange application stopped working in the United States on Saturday night, after the Supreme Court supported a law that effectively banned the application, some users delete the application from their phones. The next day, the app began to work again when President Trump said he was planning an executive order to restore the application. But since Thursday, it was not available for downloading iPhone or Android app stores.
The uncertainty about whether the app will return to the app stores has caused some people who never remove the app to see their phones such as gold tickets, coveted by anyone who loses the Tiktok algorithm or had followed that they could not reach After hastily removed the application.
It was not immediately clear how many people delete Tiktok and if he would return to app stores. But people like Piotr Gustab, 37, of Queens, see the opportunity in uncertainty.
An Information Technology Engineer, Mr. Gustab, reported the iPhone 15 Pro with Tiktok downloaded to it for $ 3,000, about three times the cost of a brand new iPhone 16 Pro. On Thursday night, he had an offer for $ 1,200, even more than almost every brand new iPhone and almost twice as much as a renovated iPhone 15 Pro without Tiktok.
“It would be good for me because I could get a few hundred dollars on it,” Mr Gustab said. It will reduce its requested price to $ 2,000 if it does not get a better offer soon, he said.
“Unlocked with Tiktok and Capcut”, an ad in Poshmark Reads ($ 3,500). “The iPhone 14 Pro Unlocked! W/ Tiktok,” A list on ebay calls ($ 3,000). On Facebook Marketplace, sellers include screen records on their listings to verify that Tiktok is installed on the phone.
“This Tiktok app is very much worth the man,” said Izell Malloy, 20 years old, car salesman and twitch streamers from New London, Conn. He said he was offered $ 5,700 through Facebook Marketplace for his iPhone with Tiktok on it.
Perhaps the iPhone listings asking $ 30,000 are not realistic. (Trait’n Keniston, 20 -year -old, Newport News, VA., Posted his phone with Tiktok for this amount, but stated that it was not certain that the five bids of five numbers received were real.) Even the Users passing through the most serious Tiktok withdrawals would be difficult to buy a used phone for the price of a 2025 Toyota Prius.
But if you are thinking of even surpassing a few extra dollars for a Tiktok phone, Freddy Tran Nager, the Digital Social Media program partner at the University of Southern California, thinks it is a very bad idea.
“It is very dangerous to buy a phone that has not been wiped,” Mr Nager said, referring to a standard reset process that will not take place on a Tiktok phone. These phones, Mr Nager warned: “They could include spyware and other viruses that could really endanger your privacy.”
There are safer options. Tiktok is still accessible to browser mode and some Reddit users say they have found a solution to download the app. Even on phones without viruses or malicious software, Tiktok’s uncertain future makes it difficult for Mr Nager to see the value on these phones. If Tiktok has a long -term future, it will be downloading again, he thinks.
Tiktok’s absence from app stores may sound familiar. “The Western world has fallen into chaos,” the New York Times wrote in 2014, when Flappy Bird, an addictive game where users guided a small bird through a path of obstacle, were removed from applications. The phones were recorded for astronomical prices when downloading the application.
Mr Nager said Tiktok is different. Some applications such as games can work perfectly regardless of the company’s ownership issues.
“The Tiktok app is just a gateway to access a website or a platform,” Mr Nager said. If Tiktok is dark again, the application is “just a work of art”.
But art, like beauty, lies in the eye of the viewer. To someone, distance mimics and pop-culture may be worth a few months rent.
