Fortnite beta invite to download conversion rate on Android similar to iOS

Epic Games' experiment with foregoing the Google Play store in favor of its own launcher and APK for Fortnite on Android is, according to the company, a success thus far. In a technical blog today, Epic revealed that the conversion rate for players being sent a beta invite to installing the game is "similar to that of the iOS beta."

That in of itself doesn't give hard numbers, though Epic did say that 23 million users signed up for the beta and 15 million installed it.

In a detailed official blog post, Epic goes into some of the nuts and bolts of bringing Fortnite to Android, including a close partnership with Samsung and Google engineers to optimize the system both for phones running the newest OS and slightly older ones. Particular issues were elements such as memory (due to Fortnite effectively being a full-blown console game), the lack of Vulkan support as a standard across all Android, differences between different phone manufacturers, and the struggle to get the game running smoothly on older phones:

"We'll still be exploring older and slower phones but it's impractical to go too far back. Every year, top-end phones are getting 50% faster than the year before. Fortnite runs acceptably on two-year old phones, well on one-year old phones, and great on phones released this year. At this pace, just imagine what Fortnite will look like on phones released next year!"

There is also the issue of numerous "Fortnite for Android" sites across the Internet promising to provide a game download but in reality installing malware or other undesirable programs to phones. Since Fortnite isn't in the Google Play store, users have to download the game through an APK file from an outside website, and if users are not careful, they may run into an unauthorized site and download something other than the game.

Epic states that it has pursued various takedown efforts to curb these scams:

"We proactively search for new malware sites as they pop up with an internal team dedicated to this task. In addition, we have also hired a third party IP and anti-fraud enforcement agency to expand our policing efforts. This partnership allows us to detect and monitor new domains that are registered with suspicious URLs so that if they evolve into malicious sites, Epic can take appropriate action up to and including litigation."

Total, Epic has pursued action on 47 different scam sites and says it will continue to combat these in the future.