So I did a dumb thing last night. I set an alarm for 11:55pm just so I could watch TikTok disappear from the App Store in real time. Didn't happen. Typical.
Quick recap for anyone who was offline this weekend: the Commerce Department said back on Friday that starting today, Sunday the 20th, US app stores would have to pull TikTok and WeChat entirely. New downloads gone, no updates, the whole thing. Then Saturday afternoon they quietly walked it back for TikTok specifically, pushing the deadline to next Sunday, the 27th, apparently to leave room for whatever this Oracle and Walmart arrangement actually turns into. Nobody I've talked to, including people who follow this stuff for a living, can explain with a straight face what "TikTok Global" is supposed to be structurally. A new US company? A subsidiary? Something where Oracle hosts the data and takes a cut? I've read four different explanations this week and I don't think even the people negotiating it fully agree with each other.
WeChat didn't get a grace period from the government, but it got one anyway, because a federal judge in San Francisco, Laurel Beeler, granted an injunction Saturday night blocking that ban outright, at least for now. Her reasoning, from what I've read of the order, was basically that the government hadn't shown the ban was the least restrictive way to address whatever national security concern they're worried about, and that it would cause real harm to the free speech interests of the people who actually rely on WeChat day to day, mostly Chinese-American users and families with relatives back home who don't have some other option that works.
That part bugs me more than the TikTok stuff, honestly. My cousin's wife uses WeChat every single day to talk to her parents in Chengdu. It's not some optional lifestyle app for her, it's the only functioning line of communication given what's blocked on the other end already. Banning it outright over a geopolitical fight that has nothing to do with her felt like using a sledgehammer on the wrong wall. Glad a judge saw it that way too, even if it's just a preliminary ruling and could still get appealed or reversed down the road.
Meanwhile the TikTok teenagers of the internet spent the whole weekend making increasingly unhinged "goodbye forever" videos that, as of a few hours ago, are all completely unnecessary. I watched maybe forty of them last night instead of sleeping, which, fine, that one's on me. Some were genuinely funny in a way I wasn't expecting. There's a kid on there who does audio-only radio drama bits, no video at all, and it had me laughing way harder than a screen-recorded phone clip has any right to.
On a totally unrelated note, I picked up the new Apple Watch SE on Friday when it actually went on sale (the Series 6 too, if you preordered fast enough, though mine's the SE because $279 versus $399 for basically the same daily use felt like an easy call). Two days in, the only real difference I notice versus my old Series 3 is that apps just open now instead of doing that little spinner of shame. The always-on display everyone's been raving about on the Series 6, I don't even miss, because I was already one of those people who just twisted my wrist to check the time.
Also, briefly: the new base iPad went on sale the same day and my mother-in-law ordered one to replace an iPad 2 that is, I am not exaggerating, nine years old and still limping along on iOS 9. She has been on a waiting list for a "new computer" since roughly March. This counts.
Nothing got banned. I stayed up for nothing. Somewhere in there is a lesson about not scheduling your evening around a government deadline, and I did not learn it. Ask me again next Sunday, I guess, since apparently we're doing this whole thing over.