‘Fortnite’ on Android to Be Timed Exclusively for Samsung’s Note 9 (Report)

By Brian Crecente

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – “Fortnite,” Epic Game’s incredibly popular battle royale shooter, will finally be coming to Android, but as a Samsung Galaxy Note 9 exclusive for 30 days, both 9to5Google and XDA Developers report, citing sources.  9to5Google also reports that pre-order bonuses for the will include $100 to $150 worth of “Fortnite” V-Bucks for in-game use.

The sourced report lines up nicely with previous reports that ’s next phone will be gaming-centric.

XDA Developers reports that the phones new S Pen will have “Fortnite” integration, which will allow players to use it for shooting or aiming. The site also reports that the phone will have a vapor chamber heat pipe to deal with the sort of cooling issues that come along with long gaming sessions. It will also have, they report, 128GB of storage, 6GB of RAM and run on either an Exynos 9810 or Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chip depending on the region. While rumors also note a large battery, no rumors seem to touch on the refresh rate of the phone, an important aspect of gaming on the phone.

While the rumors seem to align with the bigger discussion around Samsung’s push into the lucrative mobile gaming market, the notion of Epic Games allowing a specific platform to have a special sort of controller seems out of line with the company’s approach to the game. Epic currently doesn’t support any controllers on the iOS version specifically to combat an uneven playing field on the mobile platform.

The invitation for Samsung’s major unveiling event, “Samsung Galaxy Unpacked,” (shown below) seems to show a close up of a yellow S Pen’s button. The event is Aug. 9 in New York City.

Rumor has the phone hitting in late August, which means that the rest of Android phone users should be getting “Fortnite” by September.

Neither Samsung nor responded to Variety’s request for comment.