Hacker News Reader

Comment by eloisant | Hacker News Reader

"Unfortunately, the developer used Phone Gap and when they needed to access more complicated native API’s in an upgrade, the developer couldn’t get past that barrier with the PhoneGap SDK"

The guy was not a good PhoneGap developer, you can write plugins to access any native API you need.

View on HN

Funny part is, THAT guy got the MVP done on time and under budget. It was only when they went for the next that the developer ran into trouble.

It's a nice bit of sophistry the writer uses to blame the developer rather than the company. If your MVP becomes something you want to build upon, a "VP," then you get some staff or something and get serious. It's not the MVP dev's job to be the future source of code. They did their job, the company just tried to be lazy about it.

Just to get an extra jab in, this propensity to find reasons to blame the little guy rather than the people who pay their invoices is a big part of what has earned these people the casual title of, "insultant."

The point of an MVP though, is to start small and build your VP incrementally.

If you can't do that it's not an MVP - it's a prototype.

As the legend goes, an MVP is not even a prototype, but an ad or a landing page that describes an idea to see if people respond and/or comment on it in a usable way. The prototype form of an MVP can certainly be thrown out in favor of a new codebase, and at any rate prototypes as a generic industrial concept are routinely built by independents, contractors and small firms before the manufacturing decisions have been made, before going to a larger concern to build the product as refined from the prototype. That is, prototypes are commonly used to generate funding for the actual product. Therefore I don't think being an MVP coder who can't or won't move on to the final building stage is anything to be ashamed of, and not anything to blame like this consultant does. Not only that, but a lot of product-stage coders are terrible at greenfielding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenfield_project

How is an ad a minimum viable product? That's insane. You can't sell it - it's a marketing exercise, not a product. As a mechanism to get pre-orders, or gauge demand, maybe, but it's still not a product.

The point is that for something to be a fully-fledged product, it has to have certain features. They're expensive, so an MVP skips a lot of them in favor of getting a product up quickly. But you still have to add those features in later. They're usually not optional.

Hence, an MVP that you can't add those features to to is not an MVP - it's a prototype. You will get beaten in the market when someone else adds whatever your product is missing.

- if it will (or should) be thrown away at the end of development, it's a prototype. MVPs are not thrown away. Though from looking at wikipedia, even they confuse the two.

"the developer couldn’t get past that barrier"

I guess you are right!

Hybrid apps are prtty decent, but fall apart as the complexity grows. I'm working on integrating custom native video players into a hybrid app. It's not hard to extend features to your javascript SDK, but there is overhead and complexity communicating and syncing state with your javascript runtime, where you'd prefer most of the code to be. Native apps with webviews sprinkled here and there are great, but when native code sits as a second class citizen to html/js (like phonegap), it's a nightmare.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com