iOS users in Europe will be able to download Fortnite on iOS later this year. The move will come as Epic Games prepares to release the highly acclaimed video game through its own Epic Games Store app on iOS devices.
For those who haven’t followed the ongoing saga of Epic Games and Apple’s App Store showdown, the massive video game was removed from iOS back in 2020, when Epic decided to try to skirt Google and Apple’s 30 percent commissions on micro-transactions by introducing its own payment system into the app.
Now, almost four years later, Epic Games is finally making some headway in what has been a long and arduous ordeal for the company. The progress made here will allow Epic to re-release Fortnite on iOS, but through its own app store, Epic revealed on X (formerly Twitter).
This move is only made possible thanks to new rulings in Europe via the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which essentially says that companies like Apple can’t “gatekeep” the apps that can be installed on your app to just the App Store, thus allowing Epic to forego the App Store entirely and offer its own app to download Fortnite through.
The exact date of when Fortnite on iOS will be released is unclear at the moment. Despite this very small victory for the company, Epic CEO, Tim Sweeney, took to Twitter to discuss Epic’s ongoing fight against the gatekeeping that Apple has been practicing for several decades at this point.
This story is still developing, but for the moment, it seems the return of Fortnite on iOS is imminent, though a bit complicated, at least for those in Europe. Whether or not it will ever see another release in the U.S. and other places remains to be seen, as Apple is still sticking to its guns in the fight to keep developers from releasing apps and app stores outside of its own.
