Fortnite is a mega-popular, fight-the-demons, post-apocalyptic video game, and it’s about to come out on Android.
Thing is, the company that created it, Epic Games, just announced that it won’t be publishing it via Google Play, the market where most users – in the Western hemisphere, anyway – get most of their apps.
For many users, this may be their first experience going “off market“, a process that Google permits, but only after showing you a dire warning about what could go wrong.
Is that warning fair? Is Google Play really that much safer? Will going off market plunge you into Android gloom?
We discussed the issues live on camera…
(Watch directly on YouTube if the video won’t play here.)
Lucy Millington
Someone is aggressively washing the cups in the kitchen!!
Paul Ducklin
Well, we have a populous office here at Sophos UK and we’ve found the best time to do these videos is at the end of the UK working day (thus the beginning or middle in North America). So there are always people round about doing one thing or another.
This time we thought the dishwasher next to the coffee machine had already been stacked for the day (technology companies need good and plentiful coffee), and being live we couldn’t take a break to wait it out when we realised it hadn’t yet been done. Crockery makes a noise that is incredibly penetrating to condenser microphones – you can’t keep coffee mugs quiet, no matter how little aggression you put into stacking them.
(You could always email our boss at tips@sophos.com and argue for us to get a bit of space and budget for some sort of studio :-)
Actually, we like the location because it has natural light, is airy, looks nice and usually has a bit of a buzz going on in the vicinity. But this time we got mugged, so to speak. Sorry about that.