[mikekchar]

In my view of the world "toys" and "MVP" are orthogonal. Imagine an actual toy that is a choking hazard. There are lots on the market, and they even usually say, "choking hazard" on the packaging. The choking hazard is a potential liability that you might have been able to fix with more design work upfront and is hard to fix now that you've made a product.

MVP is a kind of overloaded term because it can mean that it lacks user features, but it can also mean that it contains technical debt that is a potential liability in the future, just like the choking hazard on a toy.

A "toy" application can have a minimum set of user functionality, but be "complete" in terms that it doesn't contain any of that future potential liability. There are some really nice "toy" applications and services that fill a really small niche and do it extremely well, without trying to tackle bigger problems. However, I wouldn't consider them to be MVP because they actually have a considerable amount of design beyond the minimum necessary to get it out the door.

Or tl;dr: "Toys" are uncomplicated, but not necessarily minimal. MVP is generally incomplete and not necessarily uncomplicated (because reducing complexity requires effort).