Whilst browsing around YouTube last night I had yet another “Fortnite for Android” video pop up. It’s this one below, and if you watch it on YouTube itself you’ll notice that the comments hidden. It’s yet another classic stitch-up. The video promotes a website where you side-load an APK (not a good idea if you like to be secure) and then you have to jump through a couple of hoops to be able to apparently play the game. Those “hoops” involve you download apps where the people behind this scam will get referral fees..
https://youtu.be/fFbvCHunL34
Trouble is, it’s all garbage. I’ve written about this just a short while ago and yet I’m still getting emails from people telling me that they’ve fallen for it. The video above has also had nearly 220,000 views in less than a month, earning the creator quite a bit of cash. However, as you may notice around the 3 minute 30 mark in the video above, there’s a slight edit. It happens because, in reality, at this point you’ll have nothing else happen. Your phone will be a malware magnet and the actual game you’re expecting won’t work.
If you look closely at the video you’ll see that the strangely-voiced “star” isn’t actually pressing the screen when the game apparently begins. It’s probably just a YouTube video being played on the the Android phone which is being used.
To make matters worse, Epic Games have stated on Friday that they will not distribute the game through the Google Play store when it does eventually appear on Android. They’re doing this because they don’t want to give the 30% cut to Google for revenue from sales, even though they’re doing exactly that with Apple already.
Doing this, in my opinion, would be against their interests, especially with all these fake versions kicking around. These sites look like the Epic Games website and they feel like the Epic Games website. So how can you tell one “proper APK” from a “malware APK” if Epic Games are forcing you to sideload?
Either way, Android users are still going to have to wait. It’s not available and there’s no news of when it will be coming to the platform.