Minecraft on mobile - safest way for my kids to play with friends who live out of state

My kids used to play Minecraft with their friends over LAN with tablets, but we moved. I can set them up with xBox live accounts, but ideally I would like to replicate the single world over LAN where they are playing in a world with just these friends. The goal being to prevent them from interacting with unvetted strangers online. While I could potentially try to setup server, I am the only one in the household that could troubleshoot it, and I don't need the headache of a home server not working when I am not available.

I see there are a lot of similar questions here, but the answers I see are assuming that all players are on a PC, and tend to discuss downloading a popular VPN exe. My kids and their friends are on tablets a mix of iOS and Android.

Thoughts on how to create these limited worlds to play over the internet?

Solution 1:

Mojang offers private Minecraft servers for mobile and console Minecraft through the Realms service, which costs a monthly fee (7.99$ U.S.D. as of Jan. 2020). This includes server maintenance.