Fortnite to Return to Google Play Store After Epic Games and Google’s Dispute

Fortnite is returning to the Google Play Store worldwide “soon”. Epic Games has announced the long-awaited return of the game to Android devices as the company’s legal dispute with Google has been settled.

“Epic Games Store continues supporting Android worldwide alongside Windows and Mac, and installation on Android will become much easier later in 2026,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney announced on X (formerly Twitter) this week. This comes as Google is making a number of changes to its app store to abide by major policy overhauls.

Google is expanding billing options for customers across the Google Play Store. App and game developers are now able to use their own billing systems alongside Google Play’s if desired. So, developers can funnel users to their own websites to make purchases. The company is also set to begin lowering in-app purchase service fees, alongside reducing prices for developers. Google is also making it easy to install third-party app stores on Android devices.

Google will begin making these changes in select regions starting in June of this year. A complete and global rollout of these changes is expected by September 2027. As these changes are made, it’s expected that Fortnite will be made available on the Google Play Store once more.

Fortnite was originally removed from the Google Play Store back in 2020 when Epic Games introduced its own direct payment system in an attempt to bypass the Google Play billing system. A multi-year-long legal dispute then broke out between Epic Games, Google, and Apple (which also removed Fortnite at the time).

One of the terms of the settlement between Epic Games and Google is that Sweeney is no longer able to continue criticizing Google’s app store policies. From now until September 2032, Sweeney must instead praise the company for making these changes.

“Epic believes that the Google and Android platform, with the changes in this term sheet, are procompetitive and a model for app store / platform operations, and will make good faith efforts to advocate for the same,” the contract states.