Sort of. Kind of.

App description:

"
Chances are you love Minecraft* like I do... you may have also thought about how awesome it would be to have it on the go?

Introducing Minecrafted, built from the ground up for Apple devices without code or content from the original - but with full functionality and compatibility! This is a no-hax client.

Manage your kingdoms, worlds and pieces of art on the go, or just appreciate others. Keep the griefing to a minimal or be an ever-available op! You can do it all with this App.

Minecrafted works with user community themes and skins. If you have designs you own and would like featured, please send them along.


*Minecraft is a game originally by Mojang Specifications and developed primarily by Markus Persson (aka Notch). He is doing fantastic work on Minecraft Alpha and I encourage you to support his development efforts by visiting http://minecraft.net
"


Link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/minecrafted/id400153353?mt=8

"Sort of" indeed; it's Creative only, which lacks most of what makes Minecraft great. Replicating alpha will be a lot harder and won't provide a faithful experience. Replicating chunk generation and portal behaviour (for single player) would be hard enough, but on top of that players often make extensive use of unintended side-effects of Notch's code.

Just one example of many is using water physics to make an elevator (you can see one in "Rupture" on the GOG server, 78.240.217.126); it allows you to zoom upwards by inexplicably riding on water that is completely hidden behind the wall, which shouldn't even be possible (and in fact it almost isn't--this trick only works if the water is flowing towards particular compass directions).

This sort of thing was never intended in the first place, so replicating it honestly with clean room design would be extremely difficult. Unofficial clients will lack these special oddities, so using one to connect to an SMP server will result in a severely crippled experience (perhaps even being totally unable to access some areas).

I wonder how they have sorted things out with Notch regarding the profits from this. It also seems like this is different from minecraftapp (which is also unofficial) since that has a different name and still shows a place-holder page. An official app is probably a long way off, however, since Apple's aversion towards allowing non-native languages on the App Store is at odds with Minecraft's reliance on Java.

I have not had the opportunity to try it yet. Is creative multiplayer a half decent experience, at least? Oh well, it is an encouraging demonstration. We will see a more worthy app wrapper sooner than later.

Also, your understanding of the App Store TOS is a little misguided. Apps are allowed to download, install and execute interpreted code under certain conditions. Unfortunately there is a seemingly significant subjectivity component, making app submissions a little Russian roulettey despite the rules.

As for a monetary agreement with Notch, there probably isn't one. The copyright notice at minecraft.net seems to have that covered:


"
Any tools you write for the game from scratch belong to you.
You're free to do whatever you want with screenshots and videos of the game, but don't just rip art resources and pass them around.
Plugins for the game also belong to you and you can do whatever you want with them, including selling them for money.
"

Apart from all that, I doubt the iPhone has enough RAM to cope with infdev or Alpha. Indev maybe, because that used the same fixed size maps as 'classic' I believe.

I can't load the app, it says its not available?