When will Super Mario Run come to Android?

If you're an iPhone or iPad user, you've probably spotted that Super Mario Run is out now. Indeed, you can't really have missed the fact - it's pretty much taken over the top banner on the App Store, and it's one of the few mobile games that even the wider press is interested in covering.

But what about Android owners? We've known since shortly after Super Mario Run's unveiling that it would be coming to Google's platform, but there have been no solid details since.

The truth is we don't know, beyond a vague '2017'. And not in a "we can't comment" sense, but rather in the proper not knowing sense.

Can we learn anything from Nintendo's previous actions and comments?

Okay, so Super Mario Run is Nintendo's first mobile game. But it's not the company's first mobile app. That would be Miitomo, a kind of bright and breezy social app that launched back in March.

Interestingly, Miitomo hit Android and iOS pretty much simultaneously. This suggests that Nintendo already has a certain degree of mastery over both platforms.

We would be surprised, then, if Super Mario Run for Android wasn't already up and running just fine already on a Google Pixel or Samsung Galaxy S7 deep in Nintendo's Kyoto HQ. So why the delay?

For that, we can almost certainly blame an age-old Android problem.

Beyond the obvious point about one being an app and the other a game, the key difference between Miitomo and Super Mario Run is in their value - both perceived and actual.

One is a relatively throw-away app, and the other is a game featuring Nintendo's most treasured IP. One is free, the other requires an £8 payment to play in full.

Nintendo is clearly going to be cautious when it comes to handling its main man. Indeed, some of Shigeru Miyamoto's previous comments suggest that Nintendo's protectiveness over the Mario brand have led it to worry about the Android platform's well-known piracy and security problems.

Miyamoto told Mashable that "the security element is one of the reasons that we decided to go with iPhone and iOS first". This was in relation to the game's 'always-online' requirement as an anti-piracy measure, but in turn this reveals that the company isn't particularly happy with how vulnerable to exploitation the Android platform is.

So, is Nintendo holding off until Google gets its act together with its own security measures? Or is Nintendo itself simply working on a more stringent way to protect its IP before launching it in Android APK form? We sincerely hope it's the latter, because the former could take quite some time.

There's another possibility here, though. Nintendo appeared at the launch of iPhone 7 to announce Super Mario Run, pretty much as Apple's number one guest of honour. Apple clearly understands the value of having Ninty and its mascot in on its platform.

Add in the unprecedented publicity Super Mario Run is getting on the App Store, and we wouldn't be at all surprised if we learned that a period of exclusivity was agreed upon between the two great companies.

This might annoy Android gamers, but given the previously mentioned possibilities, it should actually encourage them. It would mean that any delay in the Android version of Super Mario Run is largely artificial, and that a finished build is simply waiting in the wings for a pre-arranged spell of exclusivity to lapse.

If that's the main driver behind the Android delay, then we could be looking at a wait of just a few months - or even a month. Here's hoping.