Maybe bc it completely sidesteps the question? I have a nephew who is 7yrs old who only has an iPad and i can play with him due to geysermc, which is the correct answer.
It has roughly the same features, much worse moddability, and better performance.
At some point it was a weaker clone, but it developed into a very high quality clone, and has graduated into being a co-production with the Java version.
Get a refund from wherever you got your facts.
I'll give you half a point for "iPad kids" since that term implies a lot of incorrect things but it does run on iPads.
I run Bedrock even though we have hardware and licenses for everyone in the house - because I can use my iPad Pro with a controller, and my kids can do the same, and they play in the car all the time.
When bedrock was announced I was sure Microsoft had won the os arms race and had everything they needed to make an impenetrable monopoly:
* They could make bedrock moddable using .net, and make it so basically every kid interested in programming learned .net
* They could then drop the Java version and get more control over the game with it being harder to mod in un-sanctioned ways while still enabling the content most people want from mods
* And gain a powerful platform they can use to treat Windows/Xbox players better.
* With everyone writing .net it makes more sense to use Windows to develop, effectively reducing the number of fresh developers with posix experience. Stopping the mass exodus to posix since the 2010s MacBook air sublime text nodejs days.
But alas. Microsoft are incompetent. Minecraft was THE tool to turn the future in their favour and they completely overlooked it.
Bedrock exists to make more money. They don't like the Java free modding. They want a marketplace. They want to make money off all content in the game. They want to sell DLC. Make no mistake, they aren't platforming modders to make money because they are charitable. It is because they want to profit, and they can profit at scale by outsourcing the work.
That is in my opinion why most people are against bedrock, including myself. Bedrock is capitalist Minecraft. Enshittified Minecraft, with much more enshittification potential not yet realized. Java version is the only thing protecting bedrock from not being milked further, because it is competition.
They know most people prefer Java. Content creators mostly use Java. But it sells bedrock, and bedrock makes money. And if they can get enough people over, they can kill Java and finally milk bedrock
Java edition is also proprietary, and I don't see what stops them from milking it. They did DCMA-takedown Bukkit and lock a ton of paid accounts out of the game, but nothing further. Like they could drop Mac/Linux support, and I'm surprised/relieved they didn't. Despite it being mostly Java, it does rely on some natives, but even if it didn't...
Its proprietary, but trivially decompileable. Sure, maybe if the game was released today they would try obfuscating better, but the thing is that modding culture had already basically torn the game apart by the time Microsoft came around. I don't think they had a choice but to accept the status quo.
There are mods to disable unwanted Microsoft-pushed features like chat signing, for example. Microsoft doesn't want this, but it is so trivial to do with the Java edition they don't really have a choice but to either accept it or legal it.
I am also surprised they didn't drop mac/linux support, but as long as maintaining it is free I don't think they will. They have lost a lot of market share to mac after all - that's a lot of customers to miss out on.
Ok I had to look this up because last time I did MC modding was when I was in high school... It used to be obfuscated. Someone used to manually map those to human-readable names (didn't know this back then and thought the names were somehow hidden in the bytecode). But recently MS has started deliberately shipping unobfuscated builds.
So I'm getting the feeling they actually want JE to be moddable. Which makes sense because they're already successfully pushing Bedrock on a majority who don't care about modding, especially on locked down platforms, and the remaining JE players are a different segment. But that could change just as easily as their leadership changes.
But also just realized, if this changed, rather than locking down JE, they'd probably just kill it and maaybe release Bedrock for Mac/Linux to keep those players. Possibly not.
Sorry for the long wait, I wasn't ignoring you, just busy.
Yes, symbols were obfuscated, but Java software with obfuscated symbols is trivial to reverse, at least compared to its native counterparts. My understanding is that the biggest change when releasing symbols was that the MCP team no longer had to manually update symbols for every update. Java also has great reflection features that make it a lot easier to make mods - you don't need to patch binaries like you do with native code.
I think you are right in that Bedrock and JE players are different segments. I think the main goal of Bedrock is to target the casual market, maybe not by intention but by the fact that the community itself is mostly stuck on JE. I still think the long term wish is to get everyone over and kill Java, as Java inherently is less suited for the microtransaction model I am sure they want.
Then again with the rise of LLM-based RE, I guess the largest hurdle for modding bedrock is somewhat lower now, as you can automate a lot of the skill-heavy but not difficult work required.
> But also just realized, if this changed, rather than locking down JE, they'd probably just kill it and maaybe release Bedrock for Mac/Linux to keep those players. Possibly not.
For anyone confused about timelines, they started releasing un-obfuscated builds in 2025.
In 2019 they started releasing Obfuscation mappings.
Before that it was all Minecraft wizards with excellent tooling.
This is on top of the issue of LLMs being a moron. like, I'm sure dumb people can learn stuff from them, but I'm sticking to books written by people who know what they're talking ahout and not vibed slop.
Same awnser as much of the LLM Proofs - people cared about other things. There isn't a lot of money in academic math, and the ones that love it don't look for low value findings. Proofs like these are, funnily enough, usually the domain of hobbyists - but over the last few years, the "Monetize everything" mentality and struggling first world economy has pushed people away from interesting academic pursuits on their free time.
My understanding is that this is in a different league (Smale problem) than a lot of the other results that have been coming out (Erdos), though I could be wrong.
I'm also not going to live all that much longer, most likely, so it's kind of annoying I'm not really going to see any upsides to an AI world either. I'm discounting the possibility of our AI overlords figuring out a miracle like reversing aging.
But it is really f-ing cool that automated math is now a thing and we are seeing it. Eat your heart out, past me.
> so it's kind of annoying I'm not really going to see any upsides to an AI world either
I don't think the "permanent underclass" will see many upsides either. They certainly won't have the money to pay for it. I'm excluding myself in that statement because luckily I have access to large amounts of barbiturates.
The math community was not a global underclass. World wealth is increasing, the actual global underclass is seeing rapidly improving lives.
You may be seeing a loss of privilege due at least in part to the inevitable reversion to the mean of US economic dominance. But on a global scale, things are going well. AI will lead to a much larger pie.
I never claimed they were. The term "permanent underclass" refers to the preferred world order of AI techbro billionaires[1] where human labour is worthless and in consequence normal people no longer have any leverage. Societies where most of the value is dug out of the ground and where human labour is comparatively worthless already exist and living there is not necessarily fun[2].
> World wealth is increasing, the actual global underclass is seeing rapidly improving lives.
The global underclass has been seeing improving lives well before LLMs were a thing. The question is whether they will _continue_ to see their lives improve if their labour is no longer required.
> You may be seeing a loss of privilege due at least in part to the inevitable reversion to the mean of US economic dominance.
I'm not from the US, I don't live in the US, and in fact I've never been to the US.
> AI will lead to a much larger pie.
Which will only benefit people if their piece of the pie doesn't shrink because they don't have any leverage. There is also more than one pie. The real estate pie for example won't grow, instead every piece of the pie will become even more expensive. Most people only own pieces of the pie that will decrease in value (human labour) not pieces of pies that will increase in value.
Why do you think tech bro billions aren't also subject to replacement by AI? They compete with each other, and if AI does their jobs better than they can themselves they are strongly incented to use AI.
Absent a world dictatorship there's always competition here. And fully superhuman AI eliminates the main objection to socialism, that you need markets with smart people to make an economy function. Full automated luxury communism (like Ian Banks) is a possible outcome.
> Why do you think tech bro billions aren't also subject to replacement by AI?
Because they're billionaires. They don't actually work for a living. They own stuff for a living.
> And fully superhuman AI eliminates the main objection to socialism, that you need markets with smart people to make an economy function. Full automated luxury communism (like Ian Banks) is a possible outcome.
Luxury communism is also a possible outcome in countries with large oil reserves (Venezuela for example), it's just not a likely outcome because common people have no leverage and billionaires didn't become billionaires by giving stuff away.
Even if "fully automated luxury communism" were a likely outcome, the transition there would be very rough and would take years. If software engineering is automated away in 2028 it could still take years or decades before the first general purpose robot can take over plumbing. (Former) software engineers will have a rough transition.
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