According to Appfigures, the top five free iPhone apps right now in the U.S. are:
- ChatGPT
- JumpJumpVPN
- V2Box
- UpScrolled
- Threads
Yesterday, Apple blogger John Gruber of Daring Fireball posted the overall most popular iPhone apps for all of 2025, and the top five were:
- ChatGPT
- Threads
- TikTok
I’m not the first person to point this out, but it’s not exactly a stretch to infer that the three apps that have suddenly squeezed in between ChatGPT and Threads are on the list due to dissatisfaction with TikTok. Two are VPN apps, which can theoretically be used to access TikTok from a virtual network in a country where the U.S. version of TikTok is unnecessary, and one, UpScrolled, is an Australian video and text sharing app that recently went viral.
To refresh your memory on what’s going on with TikTok, after years of trying to force Chinese-owned ByteDance to relinquish ownership and let a U.S.-friendly buyer take over, a legal entity was created earlier this month that can take ownership of TikTok, with Adam Presser as its new CEO. This allows TikTok to comply with a new U.S. law essentially requiring TikTok to be run by a U.S. company or be banned.
But this entity, a complex joint corporate venture in charge of U.S. operations for TikTok, appears from the outside to be struggling to keep everything in order, amid the handoff from TikTok’s Singapore base of operations (U.S. TikTok data was already largely housed in the U.S., so it’s not clear if this transition actually involves any large, burdensome data transfers).
According to an X post from TikTok, the problem is that there’s been “a major infrastructure issue triggered by a power outage at one of our U.S. data center partner sites,” and there may be various glitches, service slowdowns, failures, and issues with user metrics. Oracle has further clarified that the TikTok issue stems from a weather-related blackout at one of its data centers. Oracle owns 15 percent of the new TikTok U.S. venture.
The issues TikTok is referring to dovetail nicely with the descriptions of problems described by users likw videos that sit in review indefinitely, and posts that get low or zero view counts, often despite high numbers for other engagement metrics like comments or shares. Other general issues that fit with a data center interruption include a possible lack of analytics in TikTok Studio, livestreamers apparently getting random messages saying they need to stop streaming immediately, and irrelevant search results.
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Source: Looks Like American TikTok’s Problems Are Sending Users Flocking to Alternatives
It’s quite bizarre that TikTok has to use an outmoded platform which is not in the top social networks (X Twitter) to post that it is experiencing problems.
Robin Edgar
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