Epic Has Some Salty Words for Google After a Fortnire Bug Was Exposed

It’s easy to say that thousands of Fortnite fans are now even happier to play the popular battle royale shooter on their Android phones. But that happiness hasn’t extended to the relationship between Fortnite developer Epic Games and Google, especially after Epic opted to let players install a third-party app to play the game rather than download it from the Android app store, thus giving Google a 30 percent cut of profits. Now the ensuing issues with player data safety have caused some sharp words to be exchanged between the two companies.

Even though the company has no legal or financial stake in the matter, Google recently discovered an exploit in Fortnite’s mobile version code that could be hacked. Since the game isn’t released through the Android store, it doesn’t go through the same quality check process that every submitted app must before being listed, though Epic certainly has its own checks in place. If properly executed, the exploit could install a different, far more malicious software instead of Fortnite on a user’s phone.

Google said it discovered the exploit on Aug. 15 and immediately informed Epic. Within 48 hours, Epic had patched the app installer. This didn’t mean that every person who had Fortnite installed on their phone would have the proper updates in place to protect their Android devices. To that end, Epic asked Google to wait the full 90 days that Google’s policy allows before a bug report must be made public.

The reason that report window is so big is so app developers have as much time as possible to make sure users have the proper updates, protecting them from intrusion, and not giving hackers a chance to jump on the ship before it’s properly plugged up.

However, despite this (and still within the rules of its own guidelines), Google made the report public on an Issue Tracker thread of the exploit one week after the patch was issued.

Epic was, understandably, about as pissed as you can be in a formal corporate statement from CEO Tim Sweeney, given to Mashable:

“Epic genuinely appreciated Google’s effort to perform an in-depth security audit of Fortnite immediately following our release on Android, and share the results with Epic so we could speedily issue an update to fix the flaw they discovered. However, it was irresponsible of Google to publicly disclose the technical details of the flaw so quickly, while many installations had not yet been updated and were still vulnerable. An Epic security…