Minecraft Pocket Edition

Minecraft Pocket Edition was the mobile port of Minecraft for Android and iOS. As the original version of Minecraft was written in Java, the game was progressively reimplemented in C++ with low-powered phones in mind.

During Pocket Edition’s early alpha development, mobiles were not as powerful as they are nowadays and a lot of compromises and changes to gameplay were made to fit a Minecraft experience onto phones. Worlds were greatly limited in size, graphical fidelity was reduced and the Nether dimension was replaced by a structure you could spawn in using the Nether Reactor Core. This made the early versions of Pocket Edition distinctly different from any other pre-release version of Minecraft.

Where the cutoff for the classic Pocket Edition ends can be discussed. However with the Alpha 0.9.0 update, worlds were expanded to be practically on par with the size of Java Edition worlds and the simple biome system reminiscent of Beta 1.7.3 and before is replaced with the modern Minecraft biome system. The full Nether dimension was later added in Alpha 0.12.1, replacing the Nether Reactor Core and the associated structure.

With the 1.2 Better Together update in 2017, the Pocket Edition codebase which also formed the basis of the Windows 10 Edition and the new Xbox One Edition, the moniker of all these editions were dropped to just “Minecraft” (being distinguished with “Bedrock Edition” when necessary).

Downloads

A full archive of old Minecraft Pocket Edition versions is maintained by Omniarchive. Due to the descendant of Minecraft Pocket Edition still being a commercially sold product, no links will be provided.

PocketMine-MP is an open source server software implementation for Minecraft Bedrock Edition, and there are old releases supporting old Pocket Edition versions going back to 0.7.x. NostalgiaCore is a fork off of the PocketMine-MP 0.8.x codebase which still gets maintenance updates done to it.