Who will own the app and how will it work?

President Donald Trump says a deal to find a new owner for TikTok in the United States is done.

The future of the app and access to it for people in the US was plunged into uncertainty. Politicians passed a law requiring TikTok to be banned in the country unless it was sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.

But Trump vowed to save it, and since his inauguration he has delayed deadlines for TikTok’s sale and dropped names of companies and celebrities who could buy it.

Now his administration has given details of how it says the sale will work – though they have yet to be confirmed by China.

Here’s what we know about the future of TikTok in the US.

Before we get to what will happen next, a reminder of how we got here.

US officials and lawmakers have for years accused ByteDance of being linked to the Chinese government.

Many have cited national security concerns over the app, claiming that it could be forced by Beijing to hand over data about its US users, who number 170 million, according to TikTok.

TikTok and ByteDance deny that – nonetheless similar concerns have also prompted bans and restrictions in other countries around the world.

In April 2024, US Congress passed a bill, which President Joe Biden signed into law, giving ByteDance nine months to find a US-approved buyer or see TikTok shut down across the US.

TikTok filed multiple unsuccessful legal challenges against the law, calling it “unconstitutional” and claiming it would have a “staggering” impact on free speech by censoring its US users.

Trump was then elected – and the search for a new owner began, helped by the initial deadline being repeatedly extended.

President Trump’s TikTok deal will see TikTok’s algorithm – the technology that determines what users see in their feed – copied and retrained on US user data, according to White House officials.

A new recommendation system, which has been viewed as the most valuable part of the app, will be audited by US tech giant Oracle, and operated by a new joint venture involving US investors in order to meet requirements for the app’s sale.

Oracle already stores TikTok’s American user data on its US-based servers as part of an existing agreement designed to ease lawmaker’s security concerns.

But the company will now secure the entirety of the US version of TikTok – inspecting and re-developing its algorithm on content and data shared by US users.

The government believes this is enough to meet the requirements for a sale of the app set out by the 2024 law.

Private equity firm Silver Lake, which has investments in companies including Manchester City football club owners City Football Group, was revealed to also be involved in the deal.

White House officials said the new joint venture controlling the app would be seeking patriotic investors and board members experienced in cybersecurity to oversee its operations.

A huge range of public figures ranging from OnlyFans founder Tim Stokely to star YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson – AKA MrBeast – have been touted as potential investors in the past.

President Trump has said that the plans were approved by his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in a call on 19 September.

ByteDance and TikTok have not commented on the deal but in a statement thanked Xi and Trump “for their efforts to preserve TikTok in the United States”.

Beijing has been much more guarded than Washington.

“The Chinese government respects the wishes of the enterprise, and welcomes it to carry out commercial negotiations in accordance with market rules to reach a solution compliant with China’s laws and regulations, and strikes a balance of interests,” it said on Saturday.

It is unlikely that TikTok’s parent company would sell its prize app without the blessing of the Chinese government.

In the US version of the app, a White House official said ByteDance would make up less than 20% of its new ownership under a “qualified divestiture”.

A White House official said they expected China to start taking steps to make the deal happen.

These would include issuing an export license for TikTok’s algorithm – once Trump has signed an executive order to institute a 120-day pause to the law’s deadline for a sale or ban.

Trump has said he would meet Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, scheduled to begin at the end of October in South Korea.

According to TikTok, its US users spent 51 minutes per day on average on the app in 2024.

When it looked like it might go dark in the US, experts said rivals such as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts stood to benefit.

But even if the sale goes ahead it’s not guaranteed TikTok will enjoy the same success as in the past.

“The real question has always been whether the algorithm would come with the sale, and it looks like it sort of will,” said Kelsey Chickering, an analyst at market research company Forrester.

But given that algorithm is set to be retrained on US user data, Ms Chickering said TikTok’s recommendation engine was likely to feel different to users – and that could be a “sticking point”.

“Given the potential players involved in this deal, if the algorithmic scales tip too far toward one political direction, it could send many current TikTok users to other platforms – just like we saw happen with Twitter/X,” she said.

“The jury’s out on whether this new, US-only, app will be a true replicate of the old one, with just as powerful of an algorithm and experience.”

Additional reporting by Tom Gerken & Imran Rahman-Jones