iPhone owners can finally download and play Fortnite again – if you live an Europe and use a separate app store.
Yes, one of the weirdest sagas in recent video game history is over. After years of spats between Apple and Epic Games, you can cleanly and legally install Fortnite on an iPhone without any strange workarounds. Well, almost, anyway. Epic had to put out an instructional YouTube video for the process, which involves installing a separate Epic Games Store app from Safari and then downloading Fortnite from there, rather than the regular App Store.
I should note that this only applies to iPhone owners in the European Union, due to that organization’s relatively strict laws against big tech monopolies. It’s not clear when U.S. iPhone users will see Fortnite again.
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The same holds true of Android, by the way, as Epic explained in its blog post announcing the news. You might be wondering why Epic feels the need to make users download its own digital storefront instead of just using the App Store or Play Store like other mobile games. It’s for boring business reasons: Apple and Google historically take some money off the top of in-app purchases for themselves, and Epic wants to reap all of the revenue for itself, as companies are wont to do.
Regardless of the how and why, all of the nonsense of the past few years is over. No more needing to stream Fortnite to an iPhone or anything like that. If you like Fortnite and live in Europe, congratulations. For everyone else…the wait continues.