It won’t matter if there are ways to side load or circumvent, though. 99.9% of users will not be willing to be bothered with such things and the US market would effectively die for the app.

Either tiktok becomes an American company or leaves… Ah, the free market has spoken

People keep saying this and I’m struggling to understand where this idea is coming from. The bill isn’t saying that they have to sell TikTok to a US company. They don’t have to sell it to the US government, or an owner in the US. Just divorce the company from explicit control by the Chinese government. Currently, the government can request any data they want from TikTok and they are obligated to provided it. Similarly, business laws in China mean that the government can also push changes down into the company, like a tweak to the algorithm to influence foreign perceptions of a topic for example.

The requirements laid out in this bill are meant to break that obligation and influence. It doesn’t say who should own the company - only who shouldn’t.

How would we feel if say, China decided Microsoft/Google/AWS/Oracle had to sell to a Chinese company on the grounds of national security?

But no one is saying that ByteDance has to sell TikTok to a US company. Just divest it to an owner that is not beholden to the Chinese government and obligated to share any and all data upon request. Compared to the legal requirements that China puts on US companies operating in China, this is a pretty tame ask.

It has a secondary interaction interface that’s novel - if you hold your hand at the right position, it projects data or controls into your palm which can then be navigated by tilting your hand and “clicking” with a finger tap gesture. This interface is also more private, and used for entering your pin to unlock the device, but can be used for other interactions like viewing long form responses to voice prompts where you can scroll through the data rather than trying to absorb everything as it’s spoken (or if you don’t want to have a spoken reply).

It’s an interesting concept, but I tend to agree with the user you replied to in that this is a solution in search of a problem.

The Google Reader shutdown hit me hard also. They offered all of the features in a really great app and many of the competitors shut down in their wake, so when they exited the scene, it left a huge hole.