DrMature wrote:1. An idiots guide to mods on android would be a good page. Particularly a list of established mods which could be used on a basic phone.
That's hard to tell. There are so many mods! It really depends. Most ought to run fine on their own, but if you combine too many, the low ressources of a phone will show up. I wouldn't run Dreambuilder on a phone/tablet :-)
In theory, the online modstore ought to be a simple way to install mods. Other than that, there's always the file system where you can add mods directly...provided you know the basics (i.e. how to work on filesystem level). It's not diffrent from the desktop version in that regard.
DrMature wrote:2. Efficiency is a bit of an issue with mods (both for minetest and minecraft). I wonder if there's something intrinsic about mods that makes them less efficient. (after all mcpe runs smoothly with many mobs)
They're mods. They need to interface with the rest of the game, they do things on their own...hard to do without any ressources at all :-) In general, mods that only add a couple of blocks are cheapest. Mods that let those blocks change depending on circumstances (i.e. player detector, mesecons, reaction to players, reaction to environment in the game, leaf decay, ..) require some computation time for their tasks. Mods that change the landscape require time when new parts of the map are generated. Changing large parts of the map frequently is expensive.
DrMature wrote:3. I think there's a considerable appetite for an easy to use minecraft clone. Learning to use mods is not trivial and will put many users off. It would suggest that a suitably packaged version of minetest plus mods would be popular.
Perhaps the planned adding of subgames may help here. It's more relevant to the mobile version than to the normal one due to it beeing more tricky to install mods on the mobile version.