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Fit an entire Minecraft world onto your phone. Minecraft for Android lets you explore, battle, design structures, and build contraptions, by yourself or with friends.

Pros

Easy to get going: Sign in, tap Play, and you are in a map ready to explore. The game plays two-handed, and you move around using the arrow buttons in the lower left corner. Jump by tapping the rectangle button in the lower right.. As in the desktop edition, you can jump, sprint, sneak, and break and place items. As with the desktop version of the game, you can view health, hunger, and experience levels in the game's display.

It's the Minecraft you love: You can gather and craft items, use tools and create weapons, survive the night, fight or -- as with wolves and ocelots -- tame creatures, farm, trade with villagers, and travel to alternate dimensions.

Realms: Through Minecraft Realms, you can create and manage a private server hosted by Mojang for 3 to 11 concurrent players. After a 30-day trial, you pay $3.99 to $7.99 a month -- depending on how many family and friends play at one time -- to run the server. Anyone you invite to the server can join and play for free.

Servers: For something more expansive, you can play on a server. Servers are tailored for different playing styles -- such as PVP, construction, survival, minigames, and parkour -- and let you play with other players. Mojang partners with three approved servers that promise a safe environment to play in; you can find them on the Servers tab of the game's main screen. You can also join a third-party server by tapping the Add Server button on the main screen and entering the server information.

For something simpler, you have the choice of sharing your map with other people on your local networking for a multiplayer game.

Play with friends: You can add and play with friends either through Realms or a multiplayer game on a local network. Use in-game chat to communicate.

Cons

Unruly servers: While many servers are well managed, with supportive mods and admins, some can be chaotic and not appropriate for everyone.

Microtransactions: You can buy Minecoins -- starting at $1.99 for 320 coins -- to unlock custom skins skins, texture packs, and maps.

A bit small on a phone's display: The game is surprisingly easy to play on a small screen, but the expansive maps and various biomes benefit from a larger screen, such as on a tablet.

Bottom Line

The mobile version of Minecraft brings all that's fun about the open-ended game to your Android phone. You can play by yourself or with friends on Mojang-approved servers, ones you set up yourself, of those hosted on independent servers. While the game is playable on a phone, the blocky landscapes look better on a larger screen.

How can you tell if an Android app is safe?