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. CloudFlare is responsible for something like 25% of the entire world’s internet traffic. Even if they aren’t hosting it, they’re still dealing with routing. Self-hosting in another country won’t help if your traffic still bounces off of a CloudFlare server.
This is similar to the situation that started the Itch.io and FunkoPop feud. Itch.io was hosting a game that FunkoPop believed infringed on their trademark. Instead of just submitting a request to take the game down, Funko went above Itch’s head and got the entire site blocked. Itch.io didn’t even know anything was wrong until their site was suddenly inaccessible. And it was inaccessible even though their servers were perfectly fine, because the systems used to access their servers had been the ones to actually block the site.
This is likely a custom page rule, not something CF did themselves. They’ve fought the government before to protect pages that were infringing on one law or another, and if it was them then APK Mirror would probably be saying so, so that they weren’t blamed.
As much as cloud flare is the evil overlord, they're actually highly resistant to blocking sites. You really need to force their hand before they'll block it they don't just flip the switch on any request.
I think we need to take apart IPFS and put it back together in a more usable form.
Hell just torrenting the APKs wouldn't be that hard. We've been hosting s*** that people don't want hosted since the internet was a couple of daemons on big iron
I mean, it took a literal act of congress. But even CloudFlare needs to abide by the law.
Yup, they will comply with legal requirements, but it usually has to go to a lawyer before they'll intervene.