It was only yesterday that Epic Games announced the availability of its massively popular Fortnite mobile game for the iPhone and iPad in the European Union via both the AltStore PAL and Epic Games Store alternative marketplaces.
The announcement marked the first time Fortnite mobile had been available on the platform following several years’ of litigation after exiting the App Store because of a spat between Epic Games and Apple over payments. On the other hand, the aforementioned alternative marketplaces aren’t available outside of the European Union where the Digital Markets Act (DMA) applies, so it isn’t exactly the most exciting approach for the rest of the world.
As many who’ve attempted to sideload decrypted versions of the Fortnite .ipa file on their iPhones or iPads know, these attempts generally yield unsuccessful results. The game appears to have jailbreak detection as well as sideloading mitigations, and this can cause issues where certain versions of the app won’t work as expected on those devices.
On the other hand, an increasing number of people have taken to Reddit and other communication platforms to share that they’ve been successful perma-signing certain decrypted builds of the Fortnite mobile game on their devices with TrollStore – both jailbroken and non-jailbroken. These same posters have shared that this only works with TrollStore, and not with sideloading methods like AltStore and Sideloadly.
What this appears to indicate is that certain versions of the Fortnite mobile game may not detect installed jailbreaks or TrollStore, which is potentially good news for those who aren’t residing in the European Union that may want to take advantage of mobile gameplay.
TrollStore is a perma-signing utility that gives apps elevated privileges via a powerful CoreTrust exploit. Like sideloading, these apps are installed outside of the App Store, but unlike sideloading, they never expire. TrollStore can only be used with iOS & iPadOS firmware versions 14.0-16.6.1 and 17.0. On all other firmware versions, the CoreTrust exploit has been patched and is therefore inviable.
We have a full tutorial showcasing how to decrypt your own iOS apps, which would make it possible to then perma-sign them with TrollStore. While it’s also possible to acquire pre-decrypted apps from third-party sources, we don’t recommend doing this for two reasons: 1) it’s piracy since an unauthorized party is distributing someone else’s work (whether it was originally free or not); and 2) it’s possible that those .ipa files could harbor hidden malware. That said, we can’t and wouldn’t link directly to those files.
In any case, we thought it was interesting to see that an app with such high jailbreak detection standards was being installed using a non-legitimate way in regions where it wouldn’t typically be available. It’s remains to be seen if Epic Games will do anything to block these players from continuing to play, as mobile gamers around the world want to be able to enjoy these games just as much as European Union users do.
Are you going to be running Fortnite mobile through TrollStore? Let us know in the comments section down below.
