Fortnite Reaches 15 million Android Downloads without Google Play

In bringing Fortnite to Android this summer, Epic gambled that the biggest video game phenomenon in the world could find success without relying on the centralized Google Play storefront (and its 30 percent cut of all revenues).

That gamble seems to have paid off so far-Epic reports 15 million Fortnite downloads and 23 million players on Android just 21 days after the game's beta release.

For context, the iOS version of the game saw roughly 11 million installations in its first month, according to analysis firm Sensor Tower, though the first two weeks of that period were a more limited "closed beta."

Epic has so far limited the Fortnite Android beta to a small set of handsets released in the last two years, a fact that means 92 percent of Android Fortnite players are running Android 8 or newer.

Epic says it also ran into bugs in the early Vulkan API drivers supported by some recent Android phones, making OpenGL faster than Vulkan on most devices (though Vulkan ran 20 percent faster on the Samsung S9+ and Note 9).