The Epic Games Store Launches on iOS and Android

https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/the-epic-games-store-launches-on-mobile

by noch • 2 years ago

68 51 2 years ago

epicgames.com

Elfener• 2 years ago

You've heard "available on android" and "available on ios", get ready for "available on ios (europe only)".

pohuing• 2 years ago

Funny to see this go the other way for once. Usually it's us waiting for NA only products to trickle over.

Tomte• 2 years ago

Also, only iOS, not iPadOS. Although I'm pretty sure the EU will force that, as well.

galad87• 2 years ago

Already done, third party stores will be possible in iPadOS 18.

dunekid• 2 years ago

I guess europe in this case extends to Americas, by the existence of French Guiana and other outermost EU regions. I am wondering if that could pave way for some technological quirks if these things do not trickle into NA quick enough.

mstolpm• 2 years ago

There is already the opposite situation: "available on iOS AppStore (except in EU)". And that might pop up more often in the future.

self_awareness• 2 years ago

mstolpm wrote: > There is already the opposite situation: "available on iOS AppStore (except in > EU)". And that might pop up more often in the future.

We already have lots of that related to website access. "Not available due to GDPR" is a pretty common error message for me.

If anyone wants to reply that "I've just dodged a bullet thanks to EU blocking unethical websites" then all I can say is I know how to dodge bullets by myself, thanks.

stavros5• 2 years ago

I'm looking forward to this, even if only to have an alternative Android store that doesn't take such an egregious fee. I just want the market forces to decide the cut, instead of the monopolies. The only thing left to fix is Apple's ridiculous "fee for not putting things on our store".

Hopefully someone will do this soon, if the Epic store isn't this (or is this for just games).

indy• 2 years ago

If you're on Android try installing the F-Droid app store, lots of open source apps are available on it (and Droid-ify is a good looking client for F-Droid if you want an app store UI with Material design)

stavros5• 2 years ago

I already have F-droid, Obtainium, etc, but these are pretty niche. It will be great to have something mass-market (not just for FOSS) that most consumers will have on their phones.

Thanks for Droid-ify, I didn't know about that!

dools3• 2 years ago

"I just want the market forces to decide the cut, instead of the monopolies"

Ironically it is the fetish with free market economics that produces the monopolies. I wonder how many "techno optimist" libertarians are also cheering the fact that Apple has been forced by government regulation to allow competitors onto their platform.

chii2• 2 years ago

Ironically it is the fetish with free market economics that produces the monopolies.

only when there's not sufficient regulations from cartel like behaviour. At the risk of invoking the no-real-scotsman fallacy, i would say that a real free market cannot support a monopoly, unless said monopoly is taking as thin a cut of the profit as possible (thus leaving no room for competition as the initial outlay of capital would not be worth it).

stavros5• 2 years ago

Ironically it is the fetish with free market economics that produces the monopolies.

Not really, it's the fetish with taking free market economics to the extreme. You can't really have a free market without regulation, though now we're getting in a GPL-vs-MIT-like argument of whether "free" means "without restrictions" or "with restrictions that ensure the desired outcomes are produced".

lern_too_spel2• 2 years ago

Amazon has had its App Store on Android for years. It was a good source of high quality apps given away for free for a while. If Epic does that too, consumers win.

stavros5• 2 years ago

Oh you're right! I forgot about that, I wonder what happened to it.

Vespasian2• 2 years ago

That process they show in the youtube video is pretty involved and very complex for no other reason than to keep people locked in to the apple store.

As a layman I doubt this is compliant with the appropriate EU laws (specifically the DMA)

Unfortunately this behaviour does not come as a surprise but I certainly hope the regulatory "beatings" will continue until compliance improves.

kiririn• 2 years ago

It’s no worse than the process for installing an android apk downloaded using the browser for the first time

See the video for Android for comparison

nodja• 2 years ago

If you don't know what you're doing, on ios you need a separate video with instructions (or fumble around) to figure out how to install a third party app, while on android the prompts guide you.

On android when you download an apk and try to install it, you get a popup saying something like "Chrome needs permission to install unknown apps." with a button to cancel or go directly to the settings and give chrome the permissions, after you enable the permissions you also get the prompt to install the apk right away. This is the equivalent on windows to just clicking next half a dozen times to install some software, on ios you have to trigger the install, go manually to the settings and enable the permission, then trigger the install again.

aranelsurion• 2 years ago

Just installed the Epic Store, my experience step-by-step:

1. Go to Epic Store website, click on Install

2. Nothing happens

3. Click again

4. Popup message appears, I click OK

5. Popup gone. Do I have the app now?

6. No I don’t. I read the steps again.

7. Ooh I needed to go to Settings and approve it there.

8. I went to Settings, it appears at the top. I click.

9. Another popup with lots of text appears. I click yes.

10. Now I need to go back to that Epic page and hit Install again for the third time.

11. Click “Install”. Nothing happens.

12. Get annoyed, click Install five more times. Another popup appears.

13. I click yes.

14. Finally, I have the Epic Store installed!

It’s hard to imagine this experience wasn’t intentionally made so awful.

supermatt• 2 years ago

Apples store should have to be installed in the same way, IMHO. It should also remove itself regularly to ensure it continues to do so. Only then will the process to add and use 3rd party stores be fair.

xela79• 2 years ago

just went to the site, read what was there; Click install, go to settings, approve, click install. Go to app library, launch epic store; DONE

RTFM

notpushkin• 2 years ago

Fortnite, Fall Guys, and Rocket League Sideswipe All Coming to the Epic Games Store for iPhones and Android, and to AltStore

That's an interesting move! I'm wondering how they are planning to handle payments there.

UPD: also would be really cool if they decide to run an F-Droid repo!

aurareturn2• 2 years ago

Just curious.

On the other thread, people complain that Google didn't take down a scam app fast enough.

People obviously complain about the 30% commission fee for digital goods.

So if people don't want to pay the commission, and they want Google to police all the apps, isn't that just a giant cost for Google without a way of making it sustainable?

Unless people are ok with drastically higher initial phone hardware costs to make up for the loss revenue on app store commissions? For example, let's say the average phone now costs $1,000 and Google can collect 30% commission. Let's say countries ban the commission. Google has to make money somehow. They make the phone cost $2,000 now and also they no longer make Android open source to restrict workarounds. Would people prefer that more?

ffgjgf15• 2 years ago

Why? Is MS expected to do this for Windows or Apple for macOS?

Obviously they can still charge the 30% for their own app stores and use that money for moderation. Why would anyone expect them to be responsible for 3rd party stores?

also they no longer make Android open source

I don’t think that’s feasible at this point. Also $1000 per phone is not even remotely close to what they’d be losing (at least by a magnitude if not several..)

In any case Android is mainly there to funnel users into search and their other ad-funded services. Basically a cost saving measure to reduce the amount of money they need to pay Apple for keeping Google as the default search engine on iOS.

sebstefan2• 2 years ago

They can't have their cake and eat it too. When you entrench yourself in a monopoly, there are duties that come with it

There could've been other app stores. There could've been a choice at startup like there is for browsers. There could've been 4 or 5 app stores installed by default whether you're on a Pixel or on a Samsung device.

It is nobody's fault but Google's that they became a gatekeeper with their app store. Ie: How hard open OSes have to fight to de-googlify a phone. How they push to have it installed by default, which forces me to put my apps on the Play store as 99% of users would go there to look for my apps.

Then there are scare screens to fend off the installation of competing app stores. Then once you've actually managed to install a competing app-store like F-Droid, it has to beg you to go into the settings and check some boxes or it won't be able to perform installations properly.

aurareturn2• 2 years ago

They can't have their cake and eat it too. When you entrench yourself in a monopoly, there are duties that come with it

I mean, it seems like people want their cake and eat it too. Not Google.

People want no commission, and for Google to spend resources policing the app store.

Since Google open sources Android, Google doesn't make money from the OS itself. They only make money through pre-installed Google apps and the app store.

meiraleal• 2 years ago

Google has to make money somehow

Stop. Just stop. Google "somehow" made $305.63B last year.

Vespasian2• 2 years ago

At least Apple (and Google as well) have pretty great margins on their mobile offerings.

I expect those to go down. It isn't a law of nature that tech platforms are insanely profitable. Plenty of products are "just" moderately profitable and survive just fine.

If the market (with fair and active competition on the software side) is able to bear "average" phone costs of 1000€ so be it.

ath3nd• 2 years ago

[flagged]

dang• 2 years ago

Your account has unfortunately been breaking the HN guidelines repeatedly lately. I'm not talking about just this comment, but about a general pattern with your account - for example flamewar comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41251664 are unacceptable.

If you keep this up, we're going to have to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it. Among other things, that means not posting flamewar comments and not using the site for ideological battle.

b112• 2 years ago

Hmm. There is a point here.

The reason grocery stores and meat packing plants are inspected, is that competition on price, on profit is a thing. So eventually in a competitive market, someone tries to cut costs by reducing safery checks.

Look at Boeing. Cutting safety in the name of profit.

So if there is a lot of competition for app stores, cost cutting could come out of reduced fees, "safety inspections" could be impacted.

Which means we'll need new laws and regulations for store owners, to make sure they are performing due diligence.

At least, as a parallel construct.

ffgjgf15• 2 years ago

Boieing didn’t really operate in a competitive market, though. It’s a duopoly with a very heavily constrained supply. I doubt it was a conscious decision to prioritize profits over safety (obviously it was irrational to begin with because they just ended up with significantly lower profits than they would have otherwise) just a general culture that values and rewards gross incompetence

katzinsky• 2 years ago

The complaint is "if we have to put up with your crap at there should at least be a reason beyond 'just because.'"

The argument you get from Google is that downloading APKs is dangerous so everyone should use the store. When they don't police the store anyway then it's obvious they're just abusing everyone.

zokier• 2 years ago

I've always wondered why Steam hasn't gotten into Android game market. Feels like it would be just free money for them, and gamers like me would be happy if they could play some of the games from their library on mobile.

fulafel• 2 years ago

Even for the Steam Deck it's clearly a big project to get a critical mass of games working on a non-PC device, and that's much easier than Android (only one model of device, no need to port code to another OS and platform, no need to port game interface to touch UI, etc). Ask any Android game developer and the support & cross testing of the zoo of device models and OS versions is a huge part of the work.

Plus on Android they'd be trying to convince Steam publishers to enter a platform where users don't pay for games but rather watch ads or make IAPs, so they wouldn't really get the right kind of paying customers from there.

39896880• 2 years ago

Question for someone who is a fan of brand-specific game stores: what do you like about them? Personally I find the idea of apps-within-apps annoying and convoluted, but I’m willing to entertain the notion that I’m a luddite.

ffgjgf15• 2 years ago

Cheaper IAP tokens/coins/etc. ?

lbwtaylor• 2 years ago

I don't feel the need to pay a commission for a digital storefront. I know a lot of folks find value in app store/steam etc... but I find almost no value. At the same price, I would rather the money go to the seller of the product and I definitely don't want to pay more for a storefront.

I find the normal reasons people like digital storefronts not very compelling: safety, reviews, all in one place, etc...

I also worry about everything being in one account. If I lose my epic games account, I'm not going to worry too much. If Valve locks me out, I'm in trouble, so I would rather diversify away from Valve if I can.

The Epic Games Store Launches on iOS and Android

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