My (limited) understanding of this law is that it works by barring US companies from doing business with ByteDance, primarily hitting App Store providers and cloud service providers.
There’s a world in which they could have migrated services to an off-shore cloud and continued to serve the existing users who already had the app installed (with the disadvantage that they would be unable to evolve the app itself, since no updates). It would have bought them time to figure out a long-term, legal fix.
…But instead they chose to just block all users with US-based accounts.
Someone made the calculation that failing the app loudly for US users was the better strategy.
There’s a world in which they could have migrated services to an off-shore cloud and continued to serve the existing users who already had the app installed (with the disadvantage that they would be unable to evolve the app itself, since no updates). It would have bought them time to figure out a long-term, legal fix.
…But instead they chose to just block all users with US-based accounts.
Someone made the calculation that failing the app loudly for US users was the better strategy.