Minecraft Pocket Edition 0.11.0 (and 0.11.1, and probably 0.11.2) was released today, and one of the biggest features was skins. Skin support in Minecraft PE has been in development since 0.9.0, but had been delayed several times. Today the feature finally appears in-game, but it has some issues that keep it from being great.
The major problem is that you can't select the skin currently in use on your Minecraft/Mojang account. This means the process of transferring a skin to your device can be challenging at worst and annoying at best. Minecraft PE only allows you to select a skin from your Camera Roll on iOS, and on Android you can use whatever Photos/Gallery app you have installed.
In addition, many photo-browsing apps on Android (and the iOS 6 Photos app, our writer Tyler confirmed) translate the transparency in the skin file to a solid black color, which in turn causes Minecraft PE not to recognize the skin. The only way around this is to try different file browsing/photo apps until you find one that works with Minecraft PE. For example, the stock Gallery app on Android 5.0 worked for me - but Google's new Photos app did not.
We were also able to find a bug with pre-Minecraft 1.8 skins on iOS that causes them to become badly compressed when selected. This seems to be a bug related to how Minecraft PE converts pre-Minecraft 1.8 skins to the new 1.8+ skin format, and only seems to affect iOS. Take a look at this screenhot of how the skin is supposed to look (the skin has already been converted on another device):
And here is how it looks when Minecraft PE on iOS converts the skin:
So to sum it all up, yes skins are finally on Minecraft PE, but there are some major bugs that need to be addressed. Hopefully the developers can fix these bugs in the near future.
The major problem is that you can't select the skin currently in use on your Minecraft/Mojang account. This means the process of transferring a skin to your device can be challenging at worst and annoying at best. Minecraft PE only allows you to select a skin from your Camera Roll on iOS, and on Android you can use whatever Photos/Gallery app you have installed.
In addition, many photo-browsing apps on Android (and the iOS 6 Photos app, our writer Tyler confirmed) translate the transparency in the skin file to a solid black color, which in turn causes Minecraft PE not to recognize the skin. The only way around this is to try different file browsing/photo apps until you find one that works with Minecraft PE. For example, the stock Gallery app on Android 5.0 worked for me - but Google's new Photos app did not.
We were also able to find a bug with pre-Minecraft 1.8 skins on iOS that causes them to become badly compressed when selected. This seems to be a bug related to how Minecraft PE converts pre-Minecraft 1.8 skins to the new 1.8+ skin format, and only seems to affect iOS. Take a look at this screenhot of how the skin is supposed to look (the skin has already been converted on another device):
And here is how it looks when Minecraft PE on iOS converts the skin:
So to sum it all up, yes skins are finally on Minecraft PE, but there are some major bugs that need to be addressed. Hopefully the developers can fix these bugs in the near future.