1

My family is an Apple household (Macs and iOS devices), and we are getting into Minecraft. I've been trying in vain to find a definitive answer as to whether there are any options for letting family members use these separate devices to play on common servers or worlds.

It seems doubtful at this point, but I cannot find a trusted source that says, Yep, it's not possible in any way, so you can stop trying to find a solution.

The Minecraft website has a feature comparison, and both Mac and iOS are listed as sharing common features, namely "Realms," "player-hosted multiplayer servers," and "LAN or WiFi Multiplayer." The Minecraft page on the App Store for iPhone and iPad also advertises “Play with friends on mobile (and) PC...!” (See screenshots.)

I briefly thought that the "Realms" feature was our ticket, since the option was displayed prominently on the interfaces of both Mac and iOS. But when I had trouble getting them to work, I learned (on Arqade and elsewhere) that this common feature is actually restricted. Namely, users can only play with each other if they're running the same Minecraft edition, e.g. Java (on our Macs) or Bedrock/Pocket (on our iPad/iPhone).

I tried looking for Minecraft multiplayer server communities that host both platforms, but I've come up short.

I tried researching what it would take to host a home-based server, but I wasn't able to determine if it would be worth the effort.

We were able to get our iPad and iPhone to run multiplayer on our LAN/WiFi, but my Mac was unable to see this activity.

Are there ways to make these different Apple devices play nice with each other, or are we SOL?

Excerpt from Minecraft feature comparison

Excerpt from iPhone App Store

Improve this question
0

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
7

TL;DR

This is not achieveable!

You are looking for completely different versions of the game. Java version is not even remotely compatible with the Bedrock-Version that you can run on mobile devices and Windows 10.

Since the diffenrence is not just in the naming and the features, the Java-Version is literally written in a completely other language than the bedrock-version. [Java vs. C++] Bedrock is a completely rewritten version of the original Java-Source code, which behaves very different from the original in a lot of ways.

Redstone for example is quite often very unreliable in bedrock and does not behave the same every time. While I have to admit that those kind of things also appear in Java they are rarely encountered in "normal" gameplay.

Unless you can all commit to one of those two versions, that will not happen unfortunately.

As of my knowledge there is no straight forward way for oyu to get a bedrock compatible version of minecraft on a Mac. Mojang has published the Windows10 edition which would work, but that seems to be out of the question for you.

You might look into the possibility of emulating a Android System on your Mac and run minecraft on that, but since you are commited to Apple only I assume that would also not be acceptable to you, or even possible since MacOS blocks some of those crafty and fun stuff.

Improve this answer
2
  • It's not just different versions of the game, they are different games, just made to look similar and with the same name.
    – Fabian Röling
    Commented Dec 5, 2019 at 13:23
  • They should "PUT ON THE BOX" (c) (WITH RED LETTERS). This is utterly confusing, since usually all family members are either on Windows or Mac. Not being able to connect Minecraft on iPad with Mac is super confusing. I spent hours trying to make them connect, to later discover it's not possible. Infuriating...
    – Ivan Balashov
    Commented Oct 29, 2022 at 20:23

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .