Currently, you are unable to view the APKMirror web page. Instead, you get the following message shown in the screenshot below.
Tiktok downloads are currently blocked in the United States due to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
The link in this statement leads to the following page, containing the bill that was passed:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521
This sets a dangerous precedent going forward for the Android community which sideloads applications onto their phones, being that APKMirror is the largest mirror of APKs for Android phones. It’s also possible for them to add more apps to be included under this bill, and possible for another bill to be passed which may act as an even more broad blanket to target specific groups of people (e.g. LGBTQ+, people of color), messaging applications that are truly secure (e.g. Signal), and so on.
Then of course there a very real possibility of our president forcing the integration of software updates into both Android (and possibly even iOS smartphones) that can forcibly remove applications for the “sake of national security”.
Blocked APKMirror links:
That’s a cloudflare page. I don’t think apkmirror is doing it.
Could just be apkmirror setting up the block themselves in their Cloudflare dash. Might be the easiest way for them to do a geofence type thing.
I thought it looked like CloudFlare. Does that mean the US government is leveraging Cloudflare in order to block whatever they choose, assuming it has that as its underlying architecture?
In that cloudflare is following the law, yes.
Or Cloudflare is on their knees drinking orange juice for a more favorable seat at the table. Iirc they’re responsible for ~20% of web traffic, so it’s certainly something to keep an eye on.