How long did it take you to build your mobile app MVP?

I built an app for Android that was based on another companies public APIs as they only had a website, and looking at it on mobile sucked.

I built a prototype app in about 3-4 months that I could show to the company to get approval before I released it. It only had very basic functionality so I needed to flesh out before the company was OK with me releasing it. The actual release from start to release took about a year of development (only working on it in the evenings and weekends).

This depends on:

1. Native app: You have to develop for Android and iOS. Really takes a lot of time, you have several codebases, but you get performance and first hand native experience.
2. Hybrid, like e.g. native script, ionic, ...: Definitley not so much time like native, you have one codebase, which I think is a great advantage and you get nearly native experience, performance (ionic not so much, native script more, depends on framework)
3. PWA: Basically convert your website to an app. Works very fast, took us only 1-2 weeks. Disadvantage is performance and not so many native features like gestures and so on...

I think you have to choose what fits you best.

MVP's should be finished in a very very short time period. We finished our MVP's in 2 months or less. Some can even make MVP's in a week. The two takeaways of getting an MVP out as soon as possible are these:

1. The MVP's sole purpose is to test your value proposition and see what features you are going to build, not to get customers or show off your app.
2. There are thousands of reasons that your startup may fail, building an early MVP helps you decide whether to pivot or persevere much earlier.

Y-Combinator has a great video about MVP's and why to launch early and often. It's a great resource and it helped me a lot.

Best of luck!