Fortnite on Android reaches 15 million downloads sans Google Play

Epic Games announced last month that it wouldn't be distributing Fortnite’s Android release through Google’s official Google Play Store, and it seems that decision hasn't hurt the game's growth.

The studio reports 15 million Fortnite downloads and 23 million players on Android only 21 days after the game's beta release, despite still being in an invite-only phase for the platform. 

As detailed in a blog post, Epic details the technical challenges encountered for the Android port, which might be useful for developers.

Even though Epic limited the Fortnite Android beta to a small number of devices with up-to-date software, the team still encountered difficulties managing Android's fragmented hardware.

Memory management was among these problems, with Epic realizing that even restarted phones only allowed 50 to 75 percent of their total memory to be allocated by the game.

Applications running in the background could cause memory issues as well, since some of those apps would automatically restart after Android tried to reclaim their memory history. 

"We’ve updated our testing processes to install and run more of the common applications that most users run so that we can find these problems earlier but we still needed to reduce memory usage and fast," the post reads. 

Epic also acknowledges the rise of malware developers who have tried to direct players to download fake Fortnite installers onto their devices, saying it's working with browser makers and third-party anti-fraud detection sites to find and eliminate these sites as they present themselves. 

"Right now we are focused on making the game run well on all currently supported devices and clawing back enough memory so we can improve both visual quality and stability." 

To read the entire Android launch blog, click here.