What I mean to say is that TikTok is an invasive piece of software that is literally designed to bypass your phone's security settings and track your data, including location and personal information, even if you specifically don't give it permission to do so: https://old.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/w1i3ik

And an internal investigation of ByteDance, the company that owns and operates TikTok, recently confirmed that they were accessing and using this private data technology to track the physical locations of journalists: https://justthenews.com/nation/technology/bytedance-confirms-using-tiktok-monitor-journalists

That's what I mean when I say that TikTok is malware. As for your other point, I'm not Apple so I don't know why they allowed this incredibly invasive piece of software into their app store. But a piece of software that tracks your personal information even if you deny it permission to do so is malware.