Epic and Google have apparently squashed their app store beef and have made it easier for you to get Fortnite on your mobile phone these days. The maker of Fortnite has officially put the massively popular battle royale game back into Google’s Play Store after a year-plus absence over in-game purchases.
Fortnite had always existed on Android devices, but getting it on your phone or tablet required a workaround because of a dispute between Fortnite maker Epic and Google. The game could be downloaded from outside the Play store — directly from Epic’s website — because the game maker didn’t want to give Google a cut of any in-game purchases.
Here’s the full statement from Epic about the decision to put the game back into the Play Store:
After 18 months of operating Fortnite on Android outside of the Google Play Store, we’ve come to a basic realization:
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.
Because of this, we’ve launched Fortnite for Android on the Google Play Store. We’ll continue to operate the Epic Games App and Fortnite outside of Google Play, too.
We hope that Google will revise its policies and business dealings in the near future, so that all developers are free to reach and engage in commerce with customers on Android and in the Play Store through open services, including payment services, that can compete on a level playing field.
It’s an interesting dispute from a business perspective: it’s much easier to get other apps and software on your Android phone than say, an Apple device that’s essentially locked down with the exception of things available in Apple’s app store. But in avoiding Google’s Play Store, while entirely possible to do, it’s making things much harder for gamers who want to play Fortnite on their Android device. and those that don’t know it’s possible to download it outside of the Play Store missed out altogether.
Well, problem solved now.
[via Polygon]