Epic, the publisher of Fortnite has finally surrendered and offered its famous game on the Google Play Store. In 2018, the studio decided to avoid the Android official store and keep the 30% commission imposed by Google on in-app purchases for itself.
For 18 months, to install Fortnite on Android, players had to download the game outside the Play Store. Unlike iOS, Google’s operating system is quite flexible on this point, which is not without posing security problems.
Fortnite now available on the Play Store, but also from the Epic site
It seems that Epics was forced to take the decision to offer Fortnite for download on the Google store. In a statement relayed by TechCrunch, the publisher deplores the technical and commercial measures of the search engine, such as the repeated posting of security messages for apps downloaded and updated outside the Play Store.
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The studio also denounces the characterization by Google of applications distributed outside the official store as malware. Google Play Protect would simply block software obtained outside the Play Store.
“Google puts software downloadable outside of Google Play at a disadvantage, through technical and business measures such as scary, repetitive security pop-ups for downloaded and updated software, restrictive manufacturer and carrier agreements and dealings, Google public relations characterizing third party software sources as malware, and new efforts such as Google Play Protect to outright block software obtained outside the Google Play store,” an Epic Games spokesperson said in a statement. “Because of this, we’ve launched Fortnite for Android on the Google Play Store.”
These tactics ended up making Epic surrender which will have to agree to share with its revenues with Google. Pending a hypothetical relaxation of the commercial conditions of the search giant. On iOS, Epic had no choice: it’s the App Store or nothing.
Download Fortnite from the PlayStore