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.
“It would be a good deal for me because I could get a couple hundred dollars on it,” Mr. Gustab, said. He will drop his asking price down to $2,000 if he does not get a better offer soon, he said.
“This TikTok app is worth a lot, man,” said Izell Malloy, 20, a car salesman and Twitch streamer from New London, Conn. He said he was offered $5,700 through Facebook Marketplace for his iPhone with TikTok on it.
Perhaps iPhone listings asking for $30,000 are not realistic. (Trait’n Keniston, 20, of Newport News, Va., posted his phone with TikTok for this amount but said he was not certain that the five-figure bids he received were real.) Even users going through the most severe TikTok withdrawals would be hard-pressed to buy a used phone for the price of a 2025 Toyota Prius.
But if you’re considering shelling out even a few extra bucks for a TikTok phone, Freddy Tran Nager, the associate director of the Digital Social Media program at the University of Southern California, thinks that’s a really bad idea.
“It’s very risky behavior to buy a phone that hasn’t been wiped,” Mr. Nager said, referring to a standard reset process that would not take place on a TikTok phone. These phones, Mr. Nager warned, “could include spyware and other viruses that could really endanger your privacy.”
There are safer options. TikTok is still accessible on web browsers, and some users on Reddit say they have found a workaround to download the app. Even on phones without viruses or malware, TikTok’s uncertain future makes it difficult for Mr. Nager to see the value in these phones. If TikTok has a long-term future, it will be downloadable again, he thinks.
TikTok’s absence from app stores may sound familiar. “The Western world fell into chaos,” The New York Times wrote in 2014, when Flappy Bird, an addictive game where users guided a small fowl through an obstacle course, was removed from app stores. Phones with the app downloaded were listed for astronomical prices.
Mr. Nager said TikTok is different. Some applications like games can work perfectly fine regardless of the company’s ownership issues.
“The TikTok app is only a gateway to access a website or a platform,” Mr. Nager said. If TikTok goes dark again, the app is “just a piece of art.”
But art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. To someone, the renegade and pop-culture memes might be worth a few months’ rent.
