How to get a Fortnite invite for iPhone right now

You’ll have to wait a little while longer to play Fortnite on your iPhone or iPad in the U.S, unless you get an invite to play it right now.

Video game phenomenons come along like clockwork, especially on mobile. Just two years back, we had the Summer of Pokemon GO, and we’re now standing right on the precipice of a similar craze over Fortnite, the free-to-play battle royale game that just so happens to be coming to mobile soon.

And it turns out that “soon” means now, as Fortnite is already the No. 1 iPhone game in the U.S. But there’s a catch, and a pretty big one: If you head to the U.S. App Store right now and search “Fortnite,” you’ll find it alright, but you’ll also be told it’s an “Invite Event.” You can even download the game (for free, naturally) but you can’t actually play it at the moment, so that way lies potential misery.

You can get all the way to the following screen:

That’s not a completely terrible thing, as you can tap on the ‘NO’ button and be added to the waiting list from right within the app. It will take you to the Epic Games website, where you can sign up for an email invite. You can also skip the middleman and go right there to sign up, but doing the download first might save you some time when you actually get in.

How long will it take you to get in? That’s a good question with some good news and some bad news. The good is that a lot of invites have already gone out, enough to make Fortnite shoot right to the top of the iOS charts. The bad news is in this bit direct from Epic:

"If you don’t receive an invite right away, don’t worry. We’ll be adding new players regularly over the coming months. Players who receive invites from Epic will also get friend invite codes to share with others."

That makes it sound like the game might be in invite-only state for a while (and it could be a few months until Android users can play too). But that friend code part sounds promising, so the best thing you can do right now is sign up, get your potential squadmates to sign up, and then the first person in can help the others get invites as well.

Good luck!