Fortnite Battle Royale finally arrives on Android

Epic, the makers of the phenomenally successful Fortnite game has announced that the Battle Royale video game is finally available for Android devices.

Epic said that it is available for all to download for free and you will no longer require an invite to play on your phone. Epic has provided a list of supported Android phones on its official website, from where you can directly download Fortnite.

For a brief period, the game was available as a Samsung Galaxy Note 9 exclusive title. And was, later opened up for other Android devices but users still needed an invitation to play.

This will no longer be the case, now all Android users can download the game, provided their device is compatible.

For those who might be unaware Fortnite is not available on Google Play Store or, in fact any other third-party website. The game can only be manually downloaded through the official Epic Games Fortnite page.

This means that if you see it being offered on any other site, including Google Play, do not download it. It is almost certainly a malware, spyware or other dangerous software that could infect your device.

Epic took the decision not to use Google Play Store after a dispute over charges Google level for the privilege of being in the Store. The move raised issues about security risks especially with the Store’s extensive protections.

So, when downloading the game, you will need to be mindful and take the necessary security steps to keep a device safe, especially when doing so for children.

How to download the game

Before you download the game, you will need to check whether your device can handle it. Usually coming in at 1.9GB, it is a sizeable chunk of data.

To get going head over to either fortnite.com/android from your smartphone or on your desktop where you can get the QR code that can then be scanned onto your phone.

Once done, you can then download the Fortnite installer. Go to the notification panel and click on the download link when its finished. This is where the process of the actual game is.

When you open Fortnite installer, Android will likely block it, since Google does not allow installation of apps from unauthorised sources to prevent malware.

So, when you open Fortnite installer a pop-up message is displayed saying, ‘For your security, your phone is not allowed to install unknown apps from this source.’ It then offers two buttons, cancel or settings.

Click on settings to display the menu where you need to allow apps to be installed from unknown sources.

Once done, go back to the Fortnite installer and click on install. Once the Fortnite launcher is installed you will also need to install the additional 90MB game file again by clicking on install.

Fortnite will now launch, but before doing so you will need to download another gigabyte of the file to download on its first launch. Once all that is done your ready to throw away the rest of your life and play.

Image: Sergey Galyonkin