Month: August 2018

The Discord gaming community boasts 150 million members and 46 million active monthly users, who spend their days chatting about games, finding people to play with and looking for advice on how to resolve issues. Up until now, game publishers have had to monitor public discussions looking for people who need help or relied on expert users to assist them, but that’s about to change with Zendesk’s new Discord support bot.

Zendesk VP of product and platform, Luke Behnke, says they count a fair number of gaming companies as customers, and they have been looking for a way to have more direct communication with Discord users right where they play. With the Zendesk-Discord integration, users can request help by typing /support, and then the nature of the problem. This activates the Zendesk bot and triggers the creation of a help ticket, paving the way for a customer service rep to work directly with a person having an issue.

Prior to this, the only way that the game publishers could use Zendesk to generate help tickets was through the traditional sources like email, texts or phone calls, which required their users to leave the flow of the game. This integration allows the publishers to let the customers come to them for help without leaving the community.

Behnke says his company has been talking to Discord, whose members generate more than 530 million messages a day, about creating an integration that would work for their users. “We worked with Discord on this and they have been testing it internally and giving us feedback,” he said.

Of course, it requires people know that you type /support to activate it, but Behnke believes that if the integration works well, word will get around that this is a useful way to get support directly from the publisher without leaving Discord. He says his company sees this as a unique approach to customer service, one that the gaming publishers, who tend to be innovative, are particularly open to.

Future updates could include the ability to push messages to the community such as information on an outage, or for the bot to answer common questions without accessing a human CSR. For now, this integration is in early release. The company is still working out the kinks with publishers, but they hope to get it into full production by the end of the year.

If Azealia Banks’ Instagram account is to believed, Elon Musk’s tweets about Tesla’s take-private deal can be chalked up to some good ole acid and a whole lot of post-tweet frantic scrambling.

Over a series of Instagram stories from the weekend, Banks (whose account should be taken with an entire salt shaker — more on that later) reported from the belly of the beast (which in this case is one of Elon Musk’s Los Angeles homes).

Banks, who claims she was invited to Elon’s demesne at the behest of Musk’s partner, the musician Grimes, to collaborate on music, wound up being a witness to what she claimed was a drug-induced financing tweet and a weekend of dealing with its repercussions.

At this point, yes, of course we reached out for comment. A spokesperson for Musk responded to a request for comment in an email, writing, “With regard to your question about drug use, as a spokesman for Elon this is ‘total nonsense’ – additionally, ‘Elon has never even met Ms. Banks or communicated with her in any way’.”

A close reading of Banks’ account paints the picture that she was left alone in the house and only overheard frantic phone calls as Musk scrambled to shore up the funding he had claimed was “secured” in a tweet from last week.

Banks did not respond to a direct message requesting comment.

As soon as Musk tweeted his infamous tweet claiming Tesla had secured financing last week, there was instant speculation about whether it was Saudi money, Softbank money…or maybe no money. The theories were that either he had pulled off a coup or Musk was chasing the recent SpaceX successes with some speculative (shaky) fiction about Tesla’s outcomes.

Indeed, the “clarification” that Musk issued today does not make the financing picture any more solid, nor, experts say, would it absolve Musk from potential problems with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The financial regulator remains highly interested in Musk’s confirmation fo funding and whether or not it is more than just a pipe dream more befitting a confabulation from Timothy Leary.

There is, however, the matter of Banks’ credibility. While other sites have confirmed that she was at Musk’s house, the notorious shit-stirrer is… well… a notorious stirrer of shit. She’s picked fights with celebrities from Beyonce to cast members of RuPaul’s drag race and remains a controversial figure.

Indeed, Gizmodo is reporting that Musk (reached via DM) said he never met Banks.

… when reached via Twitter direct messages, Musk told Gizmodo that he “has never even met [Banks] or communicated with her in any way.” In other words, he doesn’t know her.

That said, this feels… insane as it may be… of a piece with the arc of Tesla’s recent story (and the founder to which, as of now, it is inextricably tied). The company makes very real, and very beloved cars that could have a major impact on renewable energy for all — while simultaneously riding the waves of controversy kicked up by its founder CEO like a battery powered toy boat.

All things could be true. The Saudis could come in to save Musk and Tesla (although today’s statement from Musk indicates nothing so solid as a deal on the table) and he could also be Howard Hughes -ing it in one of his Los Angeles estates.

via GIPHY

Musk has already shown us that he’s brilliant, but his erratic behavior recently (from random tweets, to errant earnings calls) may be a sign that he is also — at least for now — out of whatever stands in for balance when it comes to high-functioning futurists. And he certainly hasn’t done himself any favors regarding his credibility by trying to paint reasonable journalism and journalists as purveyors of “fake news”.

As of now, I’m #teamnoone and all of this sucks.

If Azealia Banks’ Instagram account is to believed, Elon Musk’s tweets about Tesla’s take-private deal can be chalked up to some good ole acid and a whole lot of post-tweet frantic scrambling.

Over a series of Instagram stories from the weekend, Banks (whose account should be taken with an entire salt shaker — more on that later) reported from the belly of the beast (which in this case is one of Elon Musk’s Los Angeles homes).

Banks, who claims she was invited to Elon’s demesne at the behest of Musk’s partner, the musician Grimes, to collaborate on music, wound up being a witness to what she claimed was a drug-induced financing tweet and a weekend of dealing with its repercussions.

At this point, yes, of course we reached out for comment. A spokesperson for Musk responded to a request for comment in an email, writing, “With regard to your question about drug use, as a spokesman for Elon this is ‘total nonsense’ – additionally, ‘Elon has never even met Ms. Banks or communicated with her in any way’.”

A close reading of Banks’ account paints the picture that she was left alone in the house and only overheard frantic phone calls as Musk scrambled to shore up the funding he had claimed was “secured” in a tweet from last week.

Banks did not respond to a direct message requesting comment.

As soon as Musk tweeted his infamous tweet claiming Tesla had secured financing last week, there was instant speculation about whether it was Saudi money, Softbank money…or maybe no money. The theories were that either he had pulled off a coup or Musk was chasing the recent SpaceX successes with some speculative (shaky) fiction about Tesla’s outcomes.

Indeed, the “clarification” that Musk issued today does not make the financing picture any more solid, nor, experts say, would it absolve Musk from potential problems with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The financial regulator remains highly interested in Musk’s confirmation fo funding and whether or not it is more than just a pipe dream more befitting a confabulation from Timothy Leary.

There is, however, the matter of Banks’ credibility. While other sites have confirmed that she was at Musk’s house, the notorious shit-stirrer is… well… a notorious stirrer of shit. She’s picked fights with celebrities from Beyonce to cast members of RuPaul’s drag race and remains a controversial figure.

Indeed, Gizmodo is reporting that Musk (reached via DM) said he never met Banks.

… when reached via Twitter direct messages, Musk told Gizmodo that he “has never even met [Banks] or communicated with her in any way.” In other words, he doesn’t know her.

That said, this feels… insane as it may be… of a piece with the arc of Tesla’s recent story (and the founder to which, as of now, it is inextricably tied). The company makes very real, and very beloved cars that could have a major impact on renewable energy for all — while simultaneously riding the waves of controversy kicked up by its founder CEO like a battery powered toy boat.

All things could be true. The Saudis could come in to save Musk and Tesla (although today’s statement from Musk indicates nothing so solid as a deal on the table) and he could also be Howard Hughes -ing it in one of his Los Angeles estates.

via GIPHY

Musk has already shown us that he’s brilliant, but his erratic behavior recently (from random tweets, to errant earnings calls) may be a sign that he is also — at least for now — out of whatever stands in for balance when it comes to high-functioning futurists. And he certainly hasn’t done himself any favors regarding his credibility by trying to paint reasonable journalism and journalists as purveyors of “fake news”.

As of now, I’m #teamnoone and all of this sucks.

In recent days, word about Nvidia’s new Turing architecture started leaking out of the Santa Clara-based company’s headquarters. So it didn’t come as a major surprise that the company today announced during its Siggraph keynote the launch of this new architecture and three new pro-oriented workstation graphics cards in its Quadro family.

Nvidia describes the new Turing architecture as “the greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006.” That’s a high bar to clear, but there may be a kernel of truth here. These new Quadro RTx chips are the first to feature the company’s new RT Cores. “RT” here stands for ray tracing, a rendering method that basically traces the path of light as it interacts with the objects in a scene. This technique has been around for a very long time (remember POV-Ray on the Amiga?). Traditionally, though, it was always very computationally intensive, though the results tend to look far more realistic. In recent years, ray tracing got a new boost thanks to faster GPUs and support from the likes of Microsoft, which recently added ray tracing support to DirectX.

“Hybrid rendering will change the industry, opening up amazing possibilities that enhance our lives with more beautiful designs, richer entertainment and more interactive experiences,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. “The arrival of real-time ray tracing is the Holy Grail of our industry.”

The new RT cores can accelerate ray tracing by up to 25 times compared to Nvidia’s Pascal architecture, and Nvidia claims 10 GigaRays a second for the maximum performance.

Unsurprisingly, the three new Turing-based Quadro GPUs will also feature the company’s AI-centric Tensor Cores, as well as 4,608 CUDA cores that can deliver up to 16 trillion floating point operations in parallel with 16 trillion integer operations per second. The chips feature GDDR6 memory to expedite things, and support Nvidia’s NVLink technology to scale up memory capacity to up to 96GB and 100GB/s of bandwidth.

The AI part here is more important than it may seem at first. With NGX, Nvidia today also launched a new platform that aims to bring AI into the graphics pipelines. “NGX technology brings capabilities such as taking a standard camera feed and creating super slow motion like you’d get from a $100,000+ specialized camera,” the company explains, and also notes that filmmakers could use this technology to easily remove wires from photographs or replace missing pixels with the right background.

On the software side, Nvidia also today announced that it is open sourcing its Material Definition Language (MDL).

Companies ranging from Adobe (for Dimension CC) to Pixar, Siemens, Black Magic, Weta Digital, Epic Games and Autodesk have already signed up to support the new Turing architecture.

All of this power comes at a price, of course. The new Quadro RTX line starts at $2,300 for a 16GB version, while stepping up to 24GB will set you back $6,300. Double that memory to 48GB and Nvidia expects that you’ll pay about $10,000 for this high-end card.

In a wonderfully clear example of “dark patterns” designed to mislead users and retain control over their data, Google continues tracking your location even when you turn off Location History and are told that “the places you go are no longer stored.” Google says it tells users, but its disclosure is the bare minimum and users are discouraged from further interference with data collection.

A report from the AP lays out the details, but the information will come as no surprise to anyone who has tried to fully expunge their location data, or who read the “dark patterns” report from June.

The problem is quite simple. When you turn off (technically “pause,” a choice of words in itself troubling) “Location History,” a major Google account-level setting, you are told: “With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.”

Yet many apps and services Google provides when Location History has been turned off, in fact, do record and store your location.

To be fair, this is explained, after a fashion, when you turn off location history (here): “This setting does not affect other location services on your device, like Google Location Services and Find My Device. Some location data may be saved as part of your activity on other Google services, like Search and Maps.”

Although it makes sense that checking the weather would require location data, it makes less sense that the data would be collected systematically, in direct contradiction with what the user has been told. It’s not exactly a deception on Google’s part, but rather what appears to be a deliberate understatement of the company’s other location tracking practices.

That “some location data” as part of your search history is precise and organized, good enough to reconstitute a person’s movements over a few days, as indeed the AP reporters did; with Location History off, there was in fact a detailed history of locations stored with Google.

Google protests that you can turn off this location data collection as well — it’s just under a separate setting called “Web and App Activity.” Why is it there? Why are there multiple places? Why is the user not told that in order to truly turn off location history, there is a second setting that must be adjusted as well? Why is it assumed that the user will understand that location is also stored under separate headings of search and other services? It hardly need be said that this is completely inadequate as far as informing the user of how their data is being handled.

Further, it falls squarely under the concept of dark patterns. The user is duped into thinking that their locations are no longer being recorded by Google, down to a warning from the company that some services might not work correctly if Location History is disabled. Meanwhile location is still recorded silently and without notifying the user, for example, that such and such an action will produce a location record that will be saved, and giving them a chance to delete it or recall the action.

The deletion of these points, by the way, is one of Google’s other defenses: you can go delete them at any time. But deleting location history points was one of the main points of criticism for Google in the dark patterns paper, which found that hardly any of their testers could figure out how to do it. There are separate controls for different types of location collection, isolated from each other and each unaffected by the other’s deletion or restriction, but it is not explained why, or why for example some can be deleted in bulk but others must be done one by one.

This kind of confusing and underhanded, not to say malicious, practice is far from uncommon among tech companies, but this is a particularly indefensible one. Continuing to maintain a history of locations when a user has deliberately indicated their preference to have no such history recorded is simply ridiculous.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Google explained:

Location History is a Google product that is entirely opt in, and users have the controls to edit, delete, or turn it off at any time. As the story notes, we make sure Location History users know that when they disable the product, we continue to use location to improve the Google experience when they do things like perform a Google search or use Google for driving directions.

It’s easy to imagine a handful of minor UI or alert changes that would fully inform users of what is being recorded and when. A notification when a location is generated, for instance, or a link to the separate location tracking setting would be sufficient. But it is telling that not only is the interface the way it is, but the system has been designed the way it is: silently recording location in spite of user preference, with no way to opt out without compromising the service. These are both deliberate choices, and the more such choices are exposed and questioned, the better off users will be.

Now that the Note 9’s all good and official, it’s time to move onto the next major smartphone. The Google Pixel 3 leaks haven’t quite hit the fever pitch we saw with Samsung’s device ahead of launch — though there’s still time. After all, it seems likely the latest version of Google’s flagship Android handset won’t officially be official until October.

Even so, we’ve already seen a handful of credible links, including a full unboxing last week, so we’re starting to develop a pretty good picture of what we’re in for with the device.

For starters, there’s what looks to be a pretty sizable top notch. That Google would embrace the notch this time around is no surprise, really. In additional to being all the rage on practically every non-Samsung flagship, Google made a big deal of making Android Pie notch-friendly.

It seems to follow, then, that the company would embrace the polarizing design decision. That said, even by today’s notch-embracing standards, this is a big one. If anything, it seems that notches are actually getting bigger since Essential helped kickstart the trend by adding one to its first phone.

Speaking of embracing trends, Google dropped the headphone jack for the Pixel 2, after mocking Apple’s decision to do so a year prior. From the looks of it, the company is helping ease the transition with a pair of USB-C headphones, forgoing the necessity for a dongle (there does, however, still appear to be one in the box). Of course, you’ll still have to figure out a way to listen to music while charging the phone.

The design language is very similar to the company’s Pixel Buds, complete with loops for keeping them in place. It’s probably going too far to call them wired Pixel Buds, with all of the functionality that entails (translation and the like), but the company does appear to be taking some cues from the lukewarmly received wireless earbuds.

The Google Pixel XL, meanwhile, appears to be going really large this time out. The new 6.4-inch Note 9’s got nothing on what’s reported to be a 6.7-inch display. We’re getting to the point where these things are basically tablets with calling capabilities. Of course, Samsung’s got the benefit of years of product design that have made it possible to sneak a large display into a relatively small footprint. Without actually holding the new device, it’s hard to say how unwieldy it really is.

Other bits and bobs include a Snapdragon 845, which is basically a prerequisite for any flagship smartphone to be taken seriously. The XL is also rumored to have a 3,430 mAh battery — actually a downgrade over last year’s model, in spite of yet another massive bump in screen size.

Zombie-like passive consumption of static video is both unhealthy for viewers and undifferentiated for the tech giants that power it. That’s set Facebook on a mission to make video interactive, full of conversation with broadcasters and fellow viewers. It’s racing against Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Snapchat to become where people watch together and don’t feel like asocial slugs afterward.

That’s why Facebook today told TechCrunch that it’s acqui-hired Vidpresso, buying its seven-person team and its technology but not the company itself. The six-year-old Utah startup works with TV broadcasters and content publishers to make their online videos more interactive with on-screen social media polling and comments, graphics and live broadcasting integrated with Facebook, YouTube, Periscope and more. The goal appears to be to equip independent social media creators with the same tools these traditional outlets use so they can make authentic but polished video for the Facebook platform.

Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but it wouldn’t have taken a huge price for the deal to be a success for the startup. Vidpresso had only raised a $120,00 in seed capital from Y Combinator in 2014, plus some angel funding. By 2016, it was telling hiring prospects that it was profitable, but also that, “We will not be selling the company unless some insane whatsapp like thing happened. We’re building a forever biz, not a flip.” So either Vidpresso lowered its bar for an exit or Facebook made coming aboard worth its while.

For now, Vidpresso clients and partners like KTXL, Univision, BuzzFeed, Turner Sports, Nasdaq, TED, NBC and others will continue to be able to use its services. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed that customers will work with the Vidpresso team at Facebook, who are joining its offices in Menlo Park, London and LA. That means Facebook is at least temporarily becoming a provider of enterprise video services. But Facebook confirms it won’t charge Vidpresso clients, so they’ll be getting its services for free from now on. Whether Facebook eventually turns away old clients or stops integrating with competing video platforms like Twitch and YouTube remains to be seen. For now, it’s giving Vidpresso a much more dignified end than the sudden shutdowns some tech giants impose on their acquisitions.

“We’ve had a lot of false starts along the way . . . We finally landed on helping create high quality broadcasts back on social media, but we still haven’t realized the full vision yet. That’s why we’re joining Facebook,” the Vidpresso team writes. “This gives us the best opportunity to accelerate our vision and offer a simple way for creators, publishers, and broadcasters to use social media in live video at a high quality level . . . By joining Facebook, we’ll be able to offer our tools to a much broader audience than just our A-list publishing partners. Eventually, it’ll allow us to put these tools in the hands of creators, so they can focus on their content, and have it look great, without spending lots of time or money to do so.”

Facebook Live has seen 3.5 billion broadcasts to date, and they get six times as many interactions as traditional videos. But beyond public figures, game streamers, and the odd moment of citizen journalism, it’s become clear that most users don’t have compelling enough content to stream. Interactivity could take some pressure off the broadcaster by letting the audience chip in.

Facebook already has some interactive video experiments out in the wild. For users, it recently rolled out its Watch Party tool for letting Groups view and chat about videos together. It’s also trying new games like Lip Sync Live and a Talent Show feature where users submit videos of them singing. For creators, Facebook now let streamers earn tips with its new Stars virtual currency, and lets fans subscribe to donating money to their favorite video makers like on Patreon. And on the publisher side, Facebook Live has also built tools to help publishers pull in social media content. It’s even got an interactive video API that it’s developing to allow developers to launch their own HQ Trivia-game shows.

But the last line of Vidpresso’s announcement above explains Facebook’s intentions here, and also why it didn’t just try to build the tools itself. It doesn’t just want established news publishers and TV studios making video for its platform. It wants semi-pro creators to be able to broadcast snazzy videos with graphics, comments and polls that can aesthetically compete with “big video” but that feel more natural. This focus on creators over news outlets aligns with reports of Facebooks head of journalist relations Campbell Brown allegedly saying that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care about publishers and that “We are not interested in talking to you about your traffic and referrals any more. That is the old world and there is no going back.” Facebook has contested these reports.

Every internet platform is wising up to the fact that web-native creators who grew up on their sites often create the most compelling content and the most fervent fan bases. Whichever video hub offers the best audience growth, creative expression tools and monetization options will become the preferred destination for creators’ work, and their audiences will follow. Vidpresso could help these creators look more like TV anchors than selfie monologuers, but also help them earn money by integrating brand graphics and tie-ins. Facebook couldn’t risk another tech giant buying up Vidpresso and gaining an edge, or wasting time trying to build interactive video technology and expertise from scratch.

Y Combinator has invested $120,000 in Mac’d, a build-your-own mac and cheese restaurant that lets customers choose their own adventure from the beginning. I popped over to one of the Mac’d locations last week in San Francisco to get my mac on and chat with the founders.

For starters, the mac and cheese was bomb. Sure, one could argue it’s hard to mess up mac and cheese, but it’s somehow been done before. Trust me, I know this from firsthand experience.

I opted for a relatively basic mac and cheese with what Mac’d calls its “#Basic” sauce, which is a blend of cheddar cheeses, a spice mix and a hint of asiago. From there, I selected a combination of a shells and elbow noodle base. For those who are gluten-free, Mac’d also offers a cauliflower base. Next, I picked my mix-ins. Again, I’m super basic, so I just went with bacon and topped it with pulled pork and breadcrumbs.

Although the restaurant is tech-enabled, it’s less of a tech play and more of a restaurant play, Mac’d founder Chen-Chen Huo (pictured above on right) told TechCrunch.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say with full confidence that we’re a tech company but we’re a company that participates in a lot of tech and integrates tech into the production of our product to grow the business,” Huo told me.

Mac’d currently has two brick-and-mortar locations, both of which are in San Francisco. Mac’d is also available in Portland through what Huo describes as a ghost kitchen. In fact, ghost kitchens are part of the company’s expansion plans for at least the next 12 months, as it aims to be in about five to seven cities.

“How we plan to do that isn’t necessarily building out more brick-and-mortars in these cities but our expansion strategy sort of ties into that idea of cloud kitchens — sort of like ghost kitchens,” Huo said. “Essentially we move into commissary kitchens and hop on to existing catering and delivery networks and serve our customers like that.”

In Portland, Mac’d rents out some kitchen space and sells its mac and cheese strictly through providers like UberEats, Caviar, DoorDash, Postmates and others.

The idea is that once Mac’d determines some of the patterns of a specific market via its low-capital ghost kitchen approach, the company can make a more informed decision of where to open a brick-and-mortar location. Eventually opening brick-and-mortar locations in cities is important, Mac’d co-owner Antony Bello (pictured above on left) told TechCrunch, because it helps build up the brand and get people on board with the experience.

“It’s an interesting new wave of restaurants,” Bello said. “As far as marketing strategies, it’s more salient to come in and experience the food because you get a better sense of the kind of people that are behind this. Putting a face behind it is more difficult if it’s all online and digital.”

Mac’d got its start by doing a series of pop-ups in San Francisco last January. The mac and cheese restaurant opened its first permanent location in July 2017, located in San Francisco’s Marina district. That first location, Huo said, was entirely bootstrapped — in part thanks to the money earned through the pop-ups. Mac’d was able to open its second brick-and-mortar location a couple of months ago in June, funded solely off the profits of its first location.

“Theoretically, if we were to continue this trajectory, we could continue to bootstrap and continue to organically grow,” Huo said. “But if there’s anything about going through YC, it’s realizing the power and benefits of expanding quickly but also efficiently and thoughtfully, and taking it one step at a time.”

A little bot named QTrobot from LuxAI could be the link between therapists, parents, and autistic children. The robot, which features an LCD face and robotic arms, allows kids who are overwhelmed by human contact to become more comfortable in a therapeutic setting.

The project comes from LuxAI, a spin-off of the University of Luxembourg. They will present their findings at the RO-MAN 2018 conference at the end of this month.

“The robot has the ability to create a triangular interaction between the human therapist, the robot, and the child,” co-founder Aida Nazarikhorram told IEEE. “Immediately the child starts interacting with the educator or therapist to ask questions about the robot or give feedback about its behavior.”

The robot reduces anxiety in autistic children and the researchers saw many behaviors – hand flapping, for example – slow down with the robot in the mix.

Interestingly the robot is a better choice for children than an app or tablet. Because the robot is “embodied,” the researchers found that it that draws attention and improves learning, especially when compared to a standard iPad/educational app pairing. In other words children play with tablets and work with robots.

The robot is entirely self-contained and easily programmable. It can run for hours at a time and includes a 3D camera and full processor.

The researchers found that the robot doesn’t become the focus of the therapy but instead helps the therapist connect with the patient. This, obviously, is an excellent outcome for an excellent (and cute) little piece of technology.

Fortnite’s journey to Android has been a complicated one. A few months back, Epic Games promised to bring the wildly popular survival sandbox title to the mobile OS, but only after side stepping the traditional process for doing so. Fittingly, while it now appears to be live for Android, the process of actually getting the game is, well, complicated.

If you want to get started, you’ll need to sign up for a beta of the game. That’s right, while the title has been up and running on any number of other platforms (including its three-day head start on Samsung devices), it’s still in beta on Android. Give Epic your email address, and they’ll send you an invite…”as soon as you can play.”

How soon is that? Well, there appears to be a waiting list at the moment. How long all of this will take is anyone’s guess, though the company says it can take “a few days” for all of it to go through. Since the whole thing is bypassing the Google Play store (much to Google’s chagrin), you’ll need to install the Fortnite Installer APK to install Fortnite the game.

I went through a similar process to get the game on the Note 9. It’s weird and kind of annoying, but when it’s done, it’s done.

Oh, and you’ll want to make sure your phone is compatible. Epic’s got the full list here, which seems to include a pretty broad range, including Pixel devices and handsets from Huawei, LG, Nokia, OnePlus, Xiaomi, ZTE and Razer.