What has just happened? After having disappeared for almost five years, Fortnite returned to the IOS store in the United States. The 1,740 days since it was deleted saw Apple and Epic games fight things in the courts, but now he has finally returned to the Apple App Store in the United States, as well as the Epic Games and Alstore store in the European Union.
Fortnite is now available and downloadable On iOS in the United States, which means that the owners of iPhone and iPad can again take advantage of the giant of the royal battle on their devices. Unsurprisingly, Fortnite has already taken first place in the store’s action game category.
– Tim Sweeney (@timsweeneyepic) May 20, 2025
There have been a lot in the drama Epic against Apple lately. As a reminder, Fortnite was withdrawn from the App Store in 2020 after introducing a direct payment method in the game that bypassed the Apple App Store Commission. Google Play Store has also been deleted for the same reason.
Thank you to all those who supported the effort to open mobile competition and #Freefortnite From the start. And thanks to all the people who first took themselves from Apple, then came later in the winning side, supporting the rights of application developers and consumer rights.
– Tim Sweeney (@timsweeneyepic) May 20, 2025
But Apple was recently ordered by a federal judge to arrest practices that have limited competition and have maintained high commissions on sales sales. The latter was a reference to the 30% Commission that Apple takes the purchases that consumers make in iOS applications.
The decision paved the way to Fortnite to return to the iOS App Store in the United States and worldwide. The CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, posted that this would happen at the beginning of the month – the company’s Swedish developer account submitted the game to the American App Store on May 9.
But Fortnite has never returned. Last week, the official game account declared in an X post that Apple had blocked its submission as Fortnite so that it could not be published in the American App Store or at the Epic Gaming Store for iOS in the European Union. He added that Fortnite on iOS would be offline in the world until the unlocked.
Apple’s response was that she had “asked that Epic Sweden subjects the application to update without including the American display of the App Store so as not to have a strong impact in other geographies” and that “we have taken no measure to remove the live version of Fortnite from alternative distribution markets”.
On May 16, Epic asked the district judge in his case against Apple, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, to examine the submission by Epic de Fortnite to the American App Store in a new judicial file. Epic argued that, not for the first time, Apple was in court in the court by ignoring the previous decision – Apple and its vice -president of finance, Alex Roman, were sent back to federal prosecutors for a criminal investigation for contempt.
– Tim Sweeney (@timsweeneyepic) May 19, 2025
The judge’s response was for Apple to resolve the question by itself or for the Apple manager who “is personally responsible for guaranteeing compliance” to appear at a hearing next week.
In a spouse (Published by The Verge), Epic and Apple said they had “solved all the problems” of the submission file, allowing Fortnite to finally return to iOS in the United States.
In other news from Fortnite, the actors Union Sag-Aftra have filed an accusation of unfair work against Llama Productions, a subsidiary of Epic Games, on the use of AI to recreate the voice of the late James Earl Jones for Dark Vader in the game.
