Enlarge / Fortnite‘s season five outfits and cosmetics. If XDA’s report is accurate, Epic Games won’t have to give up 30 percent of Android purchases of these outfits to Google. (credit: Epic Games)
Reports estimate that Epic Games’ free-to-play shooter Fortnite racks up millions of dollars per day, and that number may continue to grow with the game’s promised expansion to Android devices. Rumors have begun to heat up about exactly when Android players will get to play, but one interesting tidbit has already escaped from Epic’s servers: how they’ll play the game.
XDA got the scoop on Sunday by digging into the source code of Fortnite‘s mobile create-an-account page. The code the site pulled up included Android-specific instructions, and these call for sideloading the app directly from Epic’s site instead of redirecting users to a Google Play Store installation. XDA combined that source code with an apparent image leak from Epic’s servers to put together the following instructions:
Download and install Fortnite through your browser. Once you download, you will be prompted with some security permissions. This is necessary to install any app outside of the Play Store.
Ars was unable to confirm the legitimacy of the image, but XDA’s report cites the final sentence, about app installation, by reprinting the source code that it pulled up on Sunday. (That sentence does not appear in the site’s source code as of press time.) We have reached out to Epic to ask about the legitimacy of XDA’s report. The existing source code does refer to many specific Android models as opposed to offering a blanket “not on Android yet” response to general Android browser metadata. But that’s not necessarily a hint to specific Android device support.
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