The popular game Fortnite, which was kicked out of the Apple and Google smartphone app stores four years ago over a business dispute, is available again for your phone.
Sort of.
If you want to play Fortnite games on an iPhone … well, you need to live in the European Union. There, starting Friday, you can download Fortnite from several non-Apple mini app stores that exist under a new European law trying to spark more alternatives to Big Tech.
Android phone owners anywhere in the world can get Fortnite through a new backdoor app store, though that process is complicated.
This sort-of official return of Fortnite mobile games defies the blacklisting by Apple and Google. It’s also a glimpse at the messy, uncertain, possibly bad but potentially thrilling changes underway to smartphone apps as you’ve known them for 15 years.
Here’s why we’re in an unruly mobile app revolution, and its connection to a big, knotty question in Washington and in your life: What does it take to undo illegal corporate behavior? And is the cure better or worse for you than the disease?
The problems with apps
Apps are just fine the way they are, you might be thinking. And maybe they are!
But after writing about and obsessing over this topic for six years, I’ve come to believe it’s worth trying to shake up the mobile app status quo.
Apple and Google have had nearly unchecked power over mobile apps in ways that raise prices for some of what you buy, block you from trying clever ideas, push app makers to do scuzzy things to make money, and impose Apple’s and Google’s wishes on all of us.
Executives from Texas Monthly told me last year that it cost time and money waiting for Apple and Google to clear changes to the news organization’s apps. (The companies generally mandate approvals for new or updated apps.) Executives said that approval delayed upgrades for readers that they could make quickly to Texas Monthly’s website.
Patreon, which lets you financially support creative professionals like musicians or podcasters, said this week that users of its iPhone app will soon have to pay 30 percent more for each payment, or artists would have to take 30 percent less.
That’s because Apple is now requiring Patreon to adhere to rules requiring in-app digital payments to route through Apple’s payment system, from which Apple takes a 30 percent commission. You won’t be able to pay with a credit card or PayPal anymore.
Apple didn’t comment about the Patreon changes, but broadly says its app store and digital payment system provide a good value and experience for app makers and iPhone users.
Plenty of other app companies are fine with Apple and Google and aren’t itching for change. For you, Apple and Google make it easy to find apps, have confidence they’re secure (in most cases) and buy digital stuff with an Apple or Google payment account that’s connected to your phone.
But the doubters of the Apple and Google app dictatorship are growing louder and emboldened by courts and new regulations.
The Fortnite vision for a new app reality
Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, has been the chief complainer about apps as we know them and a key architect of what’s starting to look like the biggest changes ever to smartphone apps.
A jury last year agreed with Epic that Google broke monopoly laws in how it runs its Google Play mobile app store. A judge will decide soon how Google will have to “tear the barriers down,” as U.S. District Judge James Donato said in court this week.
Epic mostly lost a 2021 court case that accused Apple of similar monopoly abuses, but the judge in that case is now figuring out how Apple must undo what she ruled were Apple’s anti-competitive restrictions on how you buy digital stuff from iPhone apps like Patreon and Spotify.
Epic has proposed changes that may give you the choice on your iPhone or Android phone of cheaper subscriptions for Spotify and Netflix, depending on how you pay, or better rewards if you buy a game from an Epic app store and not from Google’s.
A judge must decide on Epic’s idea to let you download an Android app however you like. Maybe you’d get it from Google’s Android app store, or maybe from an alternative app store that’s tailored to teens or to video game fans.
Google has said Epic’s proposed changes to Google Play would hurt “the privacy, security, and overall experience of consumers, developers, and device manufacturers.”
Versions of these changes have started to happen, haltingly and unevenly, under an E.U. law. Fortnite wouldn’t be returning to iPhones at all without those new checks on Big Tech’s power.
Maybe all these app changes sound confusing or bad. They could be. Change is uncertain.
But Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says the downsides of the current app system hurt you and suppress innovation — often without you noticing. “A lot of people can’t even imagine a better world,” he said in a news conference this week.
That’s what all this app drama is about: dreaming up an alternative path and shaping it to be better than reality.