Will Apex Legends Mobile return after what happened?

Apex Legends Mobile has been gone for years, but what happened that made Respawn remove it from app stores?

Apex Legends has been a driving force in the FPS world since launching in 2019. EA wanted to ride the waves of mobile gaming, so it announced Apex Legends Mobile for iOS and Android in 2021. After launching on May 17, 2022, it had a rocky start due to in-game bugs. Despite consistent issues with in-game bugs and hacking, the game did so well that it earned Game of the Year 2022 awards from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Then, in January 2023, EA announced it was shutting down the Apex Mobile Servers.

Fans and early adopters of the game are hoping for Apex Legends Mobile to return, but what happened to the game in the first place?

Size is Everything

When Apex Legends Mobile launched, the first thing that everyone noticed was the size of the game itself.

According to EA’s official specs, at least four gigabytes of free space was needed to be available to install the game. It also required at least two gigabytes of RAM to run on both iOS and Android. Running Apex Legends on inexpensive phones had the potential to cause in-game optimization issues. Optimization is key for PC players who may not have the top-of-the-line hardware but still want to play the game. With the mobile version, the amount of optimization available was minimal, making it even harder for low-end phones to run the game. This also alienated some of the casual player base, making for a wide skill gap. Players on faster phones and tablets were better at the game purely because of the device they were playing on.

What happened to bunny hopping in Apex Legends Mobile?

One of the biggest complaints of Apex Legends Mobile gamers was bunny hopping, a bug that EA ignored for as long as it could.

A glitch that players found early in Season 1 was unlimited bunny hopping. It allowed for players to hop at lightning speeds. This was a fun glitch at first, with YouTube creators giving lessons in how to b-hop for a momentum boost. But as the game continued on, gamers were becoming frustrated with the glitch, especially in the higher levels.

The bunny hopping glitch was just one of many bugs that had players up in arms. Gamers hoped that bug fixes would happen during the next season update. After Season 1.5 gave them nothing but a new battle pass, the Apex Legends Mobile faithful took their frustrations to social media.

When EA announced that the Season 2 patch would fix the bunny hopping glitch, it also fixed many of the other bugs plaguing gamers. 41, to be exact. to be exact. And that’s not counting general optimizations that they made. At first, players were excited, hoping that this would bring turnaround to the game’s progress. But as Season 2 continued, more game-breaking glitches unfolded, including invincibility and jump spams. They also accidentally released the legend Crypto into the store too early, having to give refunds to the players who discovered the leak.

Rampant hacking leads to mothballed Apex Mobile

As the seasons went on, hacking issues started to bring down the Apex Legends Mobile player base. Despite implementing an anti-cheat system, hackers kept finding their way through the different versions of the anti-cheat. Aim bots were running rampant. Legends were flying across the maps. Players hoped that a few optimizations in the Season 3 and 3.5 updates would bring life back to the game, but the hacking had become unbearable. The updates were nothing more than some basic bug fixes and rewards in the store.

In the middle of all of these unresolved issues, Apex Legends Mobile happened to win Game of the Year in the Apple App Store and the Google Play store.

On January 5, 2023, the now defunct @PlayApexMobile X account posted that they would be pushing back Season 4 by a few weeks while they worked out some bugs that they found during the holiday break. This had some players looking forward to a turnaround as the game was starting to become stale. The last time the game received an update was in November 2022. To everyone’s surprise, however, during a Q3 earnings call with EA on January 31, 2023, chief executive officer Andrew Wilson announced that Apex Legends Mobile would be coming to an end.

“After months of working with our development partner, we have made the mutual decision to sunset this version of the game,” said Wilson.

The official announcement on the Apex Legends Mobile website outlined the timeline of the sunset. The biggest punch to the proverbial gut was that EA would not be giving refunds to its players. All of the money that they spent on weapon skins and in-game characters would fall into the void of wasted money. On May 1, 2023, the Apex Legends Mobile servers shut down forever.

Will Apex Legends Mobile return?

Two years later, there still hasn’t been any mention of a return for Apex Legends Mobile. Players still miss the game in all its hacked glory. A post on X from mobile gamer RoastSmith has fans of the mobile game in their feelings as they vote between Call of Duty Warzone Mobile and Apex Legends Mobile for the game they would have to play the rest of their lives.

There has been a similar game release that Apex Legends Mobile fans are flocking to. In September 2023, Chinese mobile game company Tencent released their version of Apex called High Energy Heroes. Tencent helped create Apex Legends Mobile, so it was able to use many of the original files they had in their own version of the game. Maps and characters are similar to Apex Legends Mobile, and many of the game’s hardcore players have found this to be a great substitute for the void that Apex Legends Mobile left.

Will there be a reemergence of Apex Legends Mobile in the future? During the 2023 Q3 earnings call, Wilson alluded that a new Apex Legends Mobile could be on the horizon, stating that “we know our community values a deeply connected ecosystem and our team is focused on delivering the best, unified cross-platform experience for our players.”

Gamers that love what the game has to offer hope that this is a sign that a new version of Apex Legends Mobile could be on the horizon.