Epic Games' title reached this number in less than a month

Sep 8, 2018 15:09 GMT  ·  By

Fortnite, Epic Games' huge hit title, has recently reached 15 million installs on Android and 23 million players, an even more impressing achievement considering that they didn't use the Google Play store.

After being released on August 9th on select Samsung devices, Fortnite's invite-only Android Beta program managed to amass vast amounts of interest from mobile players seeing that this invite-only phase followed a similar trend to the one for the iOS beta.

According to Epic Games' Fortnite Android Beta report, there were lots of technical problems to deal with, considering the large number of device manufacturers and the highly fragmented Android ecosystem.

They had to deal with everything from different SOCs and Android OS variants modified by each manufacturer to suit its specific hardware needs, to custom power management settings and different graphics versions for the same CPU.

All these issues would eventually lead to very different bugs and problems when running Fortnite or its installer on two Android devices with mostly the same hardware.

The 15 million checkpoint was hit in 21 days, despite all technical issues and malware threats 

"We worked closely with Samsung to profile and optimize Fortnite for their devices. Samsung sent engineers to multiple Epic offices worldwide and worked directly with our engineers on optimizations and performance analysis, and contributed many code changes especially for the Vulkan renderer," Epic Games stated in their report.

As stated in their report, more than 92% of all Fortnite installs on Android are running on devices with Android 8 Oreo or later, while around 8% are on Android 7 Nougat handsets and lower than 0.5% have been installed on Android releases older than 2015.

While distributing Fortnite to Android devices, Epic Games also had to deal with malware and scams distributed through unauthorized "Fortnite for Android" websites, a well-known practice crooks use to take advantage of apps distributed in APK form.

"So far, Epic has instigated action on 47 unauthorized “Fortnite for Android” websites, many of which appear to be run by the same bad actors," said Epic Games in their blog post. "We continue to police the situation with a goal of taking them offline, or restricting access by leveraging Epic’s connection to a network of anti-fraud partners (including ISPs, browser companies, and anti-virus companies)."

If the Fortnite Android Beta stays on course, it is highly expected that it will easily pass the 100 million mark the iOS beta program crossed in about three months.