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Fortnite arrived on the Android platform last month and it has crossed 15 million downloads in less than a month since its release, according to Epic Games. The developer revealed the ‘initial numbers’ for Fortnite in a blog post and cited that the game managed to attract the interest of more than 23 million players on Android. Currently, the battle royale game is in an invite-only phase for Android. Epic Games, in its blog post, mentioned that a ‘significant team’ had been working since January this year to bring Fortnite to Android.
“In the first 21 days since the Fortnite’s launch on Android, interest has been extremely high, with over 23 million players entering our Android beta and over 15 million players installing our APK. While we are in an invite-only phase for Android, our conversion from players being invited to playing is similar to that of the iOS beta,” Epic Games noted.
The US-based company further cited details of the challenges it faced with bringing Fortnite to Android, explaining that partners were ‘crucial’ to the process. Epic Games mentioned that it worked closely with Samsung to profile and optimise the game for their devices with the South Korean tech giant even sending out engineers to assist in the process and see performance analysis. Google was also involved closely in the process with partners like Qualcomm, Razer, Huawei among others.
Also Read: Fortnite Mobile game for Android: List of supported and unsupported devices
Fragmentation that persists largely on Android platform has caused ‘troubles’ for developers and have been criticised severely over time. Epic says that it was “pleasantly surprised” to see the adoption of the latest version of Android to be stronger than what was anticipated for 0 to 2 year old devices. Apparently, more than 92 per cent of Fortnite players are currently running Android 8.0 Oreo, while roughly eight per cent are running Android Nougat.
The developer also mentioned how it deals with malware. Since the game is not ‘distributed’ via Google Play Store, it becomes easier for those who have malicious intention to circulate malware by putting the fake version of the game. Epic Game says that it has put a dedicated internal team to “proactively search for new malware sites.” The developer is making efforts to take down sites that claim to offer Fortnite downloads and have “hired a third party IP and anti-fraud enforcement agency” to expand their policing efforts. Till date, Epic has taken down 47 unauthorised “Fortnite for Android” websites. Besides enhancing the gaming experience on Android, the company is also said to be fixing performance on iOS platform.
