No thanks to a controversial security flaw, “Fortnite” for Android is not expected to be available in the near future. That is unless Epic Games is able to find a way to properly distribute the app without putting users at risk.
Epic Games had originally planned to distribute “Fornite” for Android via their website instead of making it available via the Google Play Store. The reason behind this uncanny route is simple – Epic didn’t want to share the revenue where Google would be getting 30-percent from in-app purchases, Tech Crunch said.
However, there were risks that critics pointed out. The most notable of them all is that users would be forced to enable app installations from unknown sources. Traditionally, this is something an ordinary user would not do. Once enabled, a potential scenario could see malicious attackers getting the opening needed to install anything they please.
To understand the scenario, the “Fortnite” installer downloads an APK and then stores it locally. But the fact that it was stored on a shared external storage, a hacker could swap it with a new file in what is better known as “man in the disk” as explained by a Google engineer.
Made aware of the problem, Epic engineers immediately addressed the issue and deployed a new one. A 90-day request was made to Google to delay publishing of the information. And as most know by now, Google did not bite, exposing the flaw to the public for the obvious reason of distributing the application outside the Play Store.
Now, everything has become a melodramatic exchange between the two parties as both jaw and look at different explanations to back their stand. For Google, it was more of the manner of distribution that would place gamers at risk. On the other end, Epic lashed out at the manner of publicly disclosing such a threat as they were deprived the proper time to address the problem.
While most see it as a selfish jab for both companies, the fact remains that coursing an app through the proper channel (Google Play or Apple’s App Store) goes beyond generating money. It also includes making sure that apps are distributed safely to protect end-users. Epic Games may have initially believed they could do so and get the earnings all to themselves. But when put through the test, there were obviously loopholes they failed to address.
Being one of the popular apps that gamers would be getting, Epic may have failed to cover the safety measures to avoid the problem. And knowing how they shunned Google out of the picture, it seems only logical that the company would scoff at their request to delay public disclosure of that security threat.
