Got two kids and their mum been playing MCPE all day on mobile devices. I can hear her yelling instructions to her army of builders/warriors as I write. I put together a VPS instance with PocketMine (followed by ImagicalMine, a fork) for them but with no mob ai and lots of other problems it didn't hold their interest compared with playing on the local network.

It is a pity that the mobile version isn't more open so third party servers can support it. The family might enjoy something like this but I would never get them lugging a laptop around and driving minecraft with a mouse and keyboard.