In August 2011, Minecraft: Pocket Edition was released for the Xperia Play on the Android Market as an early alpha version. It was then released for several other compatible devices on 8 October 2011. An iOS version of Minecraft was released on 17 November 2011. A port was made available for Windows Phones shortly after Microsoft acquired Mojang. The port concentrates on the creative building and the primitive survival aspect of the game, and does not contain all the features of the PC release. On his Twitter account, said that the Pocket Edition of Minecraft is written in C++ and not Java, due to iOS not being able to support Java. However, there now exists a way to play Java Edition on both Android and iOS devices.
On 10 December 2014, in observance of Mojang’s acquisition by Microsoft, a port of Pocket Edition was released for Windows Phone 8.1. On 18 January 2017, Microsoft announced that it would no longer maintain the Windows Phone versions of Pocket Edition. On 19 December 2016, the full version of Minecraft: Pocket Edition was released on iOS, Android and Windows Phone.
Pocket Edition had been replaced by Minecraft: Bedrock Edition in 2017 enabling cross-platform play with Xbox One and Nintendo Switch editions.