The Fortnite Battle Royale Android Beta launched on August 9, 2018 on select Samsung devices. This was followed with invites sent to “a subset of Android device owners across a variety of handset manufacturers.” The team has learned a lot from the experience so far and shared their technological findings in a lengthy blog post. Among those findings were the general phone requirements Android users need to run Fortnite.
Fortnite Battle Royale Android Beta: Phone Requirements
Fortnite supports cross-play, meaning players across all devices (except for PS4) can encounter one another. For this reason, a mobile “port” isn’t just a matter of optimizing the performance for Android users. Everything that affects gameplay needs to be the same.
The core issue is that there’s so much variety across Android hardware, operating system versions, and driver versions that it’s difficult to make a game that will perform across the board. Even some of the bugs users have experienced, so far, in the beta have been specific to their device.
But as far as the phone you need, you should be fine provided your model is two years old or younger. Here’s the breakdown given by Epic when discussing the future of Fortnite on Android:
Fortnite runs…
- acceptably on two-year old phones
- well on one-year old phones
- great on phones released this year
As far as focusing their energies on older phones, the Fortnite team said they’re still “exploring” that option but “it’s impractical to go too far back.”
Once again, because the game needs to function across devices you don’t have to concern yourself regarding your specific model, operating system, etc. All of those challenges are for the Fortnite team to deal with, which they discuss at length in their technical blog post.
In short, the team is making things possible by having the game operate on one of four performance profiles: low, mid, high, and epic.
These profiles adjust scalability settings in the engine to allow the game to run on devices with different performance characteristics. Low pulls in view distances as far as possible and disables all optional graphics features. Epic has everything turned on: shadows, foliage, and the farthest view distance that can run on the latest devices.
Fortnite Battle Royale Android Beta: Beware of Malware
The Fortnite team carved out a separate section in their technical blog to remind users to avoid all “Fortnite for Android” websites. If it’s not directly through Epic, it’s a scam. At the time of writing this, Epic has taken action against “47 unauthorized ‘Fortnite for Android’ websites.” So be careful of those looking to take advantage of Android users’ fandom.
