1 week ago
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Business|$3,000 for a Used iPhone? If It Has TikTok, Maybe.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/business/tiktok-app-iphones.html
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Phones with TikTok are being listed for eye-watering sums as the social media platform remains absent from app stores.
Jan. 23, 2025Updated 9:05 p.m. ET
For about $1,000, you may leave an Apple store with a brand-new, hermetically sealed iPhone that’s been personalized for you by a verified Genius.
Or, for hundreds or even thousands of dollars more, you can buy a used phone with a cracked screen and dirt-filled speakers, from someone on the internet.
It all just depends on how much you love TikTok.
When the video-sharing app stopped working in the United States on Saturday evening after the Supreme Court backed a law that effectively banned the app, some users deleted the app from their phones. The next day, the app started working again when President Trump said he was planning an executive order to pause enforcement of the law. But, as of Thursday, Apple and Google, which had removed TikTok from their app stores to comply with the law, had not made it available again for download.
The uncertainty about whether the app will return to the app stores has caused some people who never removed the app to view their phones like golden tickets, coveted by anyone who misses thumbing through TikTok’s algorithm or had followings that they can’t reach after they hastily removed the app.
It was not immediately clear how many people deleted TikTok and whether it will return to app stores. But people like Piotr Gustab, 37, of Queens, are seeing opportunity in the uncertainty.
An information technology engineer, Mr. Gustab, listed his iPhone 15 Pro with TikTok downloaded onto it for $3,000 on Facebook Marketplace. That’s about three times the cost of a brand-new iPhone 16 Pro. On Thursday night, he had an offer for $1,200, still more than almost every brand-new iPhone and nearly twice as much as a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro without TikTok.
