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Google Play Shows Warning To Anyone Searching For Fortnite APKs (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson quotes a report from BetaNews: The arrival of Fortnite on Android has not only been eagerly awaited, but also steeped in controversy. In addition to making the game a Samsung exclusive (for a few days, anyway), Epic Games decided to bypass Google Play and host APK downloads on its own servers. But this isn't going to stop people looking for Fortnite in the Play Store. Google is well aware of this, and that there is the potential for fake, scam apps to appear, tricking users into downloading something malicious. As such, the company is taking action, and is showing a warning to anyone who searches for Fortnite in Google Play. Conduct a search for Fortnite in Google's app store and you'll be greeted by a message that reads "Fortnite Battle Royale by Epic Games, Inc is not available on Google Play." Searchers are also advised that Fortnite rival PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) is available to download.
Play store has been utterly flooded with fake Fortnite installers since iphone version release. Everything from malware and (before play store ban) miners to just ad serving garbage.
Google didn't give a shit. For months. This garbage even popped up on "recommended" list for me a few times.
And now that Epic actually stated that it isn't publishing on play store, Google finally put a warning on that garbage. Good job Epic for forcing Google to act in some manner, and what the fuck took you so long, oh benevolent overlords at Google?
It's not about the value of letting those apps in but the cost of keeping those apps out.
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No, it's actually about the value of an app store. I, as a user, have no use for an app store if I still have to worry about bogus apps and malware. If I have to deal with that shit, I can as well forgo the appstore. It is basically the main asset such a place is for the user.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Android does allow for other sites to exist. You could always find a different one. Personally, I think there is a lot of value in a highly curated store that keeps more apps out than it lets in.
I think that there is a lot of cost in policing submissions and too many submissions to ever keep up with, but this stems from wanting to have the most apps. It used to be that the main metric that Apple and Google used in their dick waving contest to measure their stores was the number of apps. It was any easy number to throw out that the press would regurgitate and that the public would swallow.
There are more than enough apps now, so I think the focus should be quality. Just curate the best ten apps for any given purpose or category and only show me those. Such a model would also make it far easier to take a smaller cut, since there is no need to review thousands upon thousands of new apps.
I think you have that backwards - if you've produced a game that is so popular that malware writers are trying to piggyback on your success to deploy some malware, then it's pretty much a given that it's going to be a financially successful game, which was kind of the point of producing it in the first place. If anything, it's the users that are "doing something wrong" here. Epic has a successful game that is in demand so has opted to handle their own distribution rather than pay Google a cut, so the game simply isn't available on the Google Play store and anything that claims to be so is 100% guaranteed to be pushing ads, malware, cryptominers, or worse. All Google is doing here (finally - this fake-version crap has been going on for ages) is informing users who are unaware of Epic's distribution model - and thus perhaps more likely to be hoodwinked into installing something nasty - that they can't find the app on the store and if they install anything that claims to be Fortnite from the store it's going to be malware.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Is an application still "malware" if it has the name "Fortnite" for a legitimate reason, such as a unit conversion calculator centered around the furlong-firkin-fortnight system whose source code is published?
For doing the right thing here. And I mean not locking down the Play Store, allowing 3rd party sources. Google could easily (ab)use its dominant position in the smartphone OS market to force Epic to go through its Play Store and forfeit 30% of their revenues. But they didn't. Thank you for not being Apple.