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This ban does nothing about the mobile tick tok website. You don’t need to be a techie to use the browser on your cellphone. Yet it is a point of friction compared to an app with native notifications. And given the expectations of the average american tech user who has been coddled for the last decade into safe app store apps instead of the scary web, people are legitimately concerned.

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This part is unclear to me. I know the article says "app," but this is general news reporting, and the term "web app" for stuff in the browser is acceptable terminology anyway. It also says that opening the app will redirect people to a page with information about the ban, not to the main page of the website. Prior to this discussion, I thought a ban at the ISP or CDN level was part of the plan, so a VPN would be required to circumvent it. No?

In any case, yeah, I'm not sure that "the average american tech user who has been coddled for the last decade" knows what a web browser is. I've observed some user behavior among family members that indicates a pretty bizarre mental model of how the Internet, web, and mobile applications work.

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