Minecraft iOS being handled by another developer, says Notch

Mojang's Markus "Notch" Persson has confirmed that development on the iOS version of Minecraft will be handed by another developer.

Speaking to PC Gamer, Persson said not to expect it in the near future, though.

"We’ve barely started. We know we’re going to do it and vaguely how we could do it," he said.

"One of our focuses is we just don’t port the game over and say “Hey this is Minecraft”, but to make something that makes sense for that platform.

"There are a bunch of different ways to do that; the ability to look down on your levels or have a different version of the game that makes sense [to the iOS platform] where you don’t have to avoid dangerously fast arrows. You won’t be able to play that on the subway!"

Persson also confirmed that the title will be a spin-off.

"It’s more of a spin-off of Minecraft the more I think of it. That’s about as far as we’ve got. We’ve had a couple of companies approach us to show us how it could be done but we haven’t written a single line of code yet."