Yesterday I released the first version of my app for the Android operating system. The Chicago Bike Guide (born the Chicago Offline Bike Map) had been available for iOS since April 2012 and the most frequent question I heard was, “When will you have an Android version?” At first I was probably joking when I said it was coming soon as I had no interest in it. But things change: more people kept asking, I was slowly learning how to publish an app for Android, I bought a tablet myself on which to test it, and Android eclipsing iOS as the most dominant mobile OS had some effect.

I use PhoneGap software to compile the Chicago Bike Guide for iOS. My app is actually an HTML5 compliant website using jQueryMobile and PhoneGap allows this website to interact with some of the hardware on the iPhone (like the GPS components) and software (native notification buttons). PhoneGap compiles for Android and other operating systems, but my experience using the Android emulator put a damper on my progress.

I would install Google’s software development kit (SDK), including Eclipse, and load the app (er, website) into the emulator and it would be terribly slow. It didn’t emulate the Android experience very well. I did this twice; I don’t remember making any additional progress the second time but I probably made different progress, slightly expanding my understanding of how to make Android apps.

PhoneGap 3.0.0 came around, and its use requires focusing on the command line to build apps. In prior versions, for iOS, you would add “helper software” to Xcode but now it creates the Xcode project for you. It was easier to use this time around, as the process in this version was simpler to understand, use, and the documentation had improved. I felt it was time to try again to make an Android version so I “made the plunge” and bought the Asus MeMO Pad HD 7″ tablet from my local Micro Center.

At first I used the tablet to test my app (website) as a website, loading it over the network from my Mac’s web server. After fixing a lot of the display bugs I moved into native app testing. One command, “cordova build android”, and an APK I can email to my tablet appears 30 seconds later. This is one of the few areas where Android has iOS beat in terms of testing.

The iOS development environment requires so much setting up with developer profiles, team profiles, and other gunk I forget the names of. With Android, you simply email the ChicagoBikeGuide-debug.apk file to your device and open it in the Gmail app. Voilá.

After getting this far I stopped progress on developing for Android as I wanted to issue a new version for iOS with features and bug fixes I’d been working on since the last release in July (version 0.8.2). With that out of the way last week, and the new version waiting for Apple’s review, I worked on the Android version on Sunday and finished it today.

Did you catch that? I uploaded version 0.8.3 for iOS on October 3 and it’s been in review since then while in less than 24 hours I set up my Google Play Developer Console ($25 per year), merchant account, store listing, and started selling the Android version.

N.B. Google Play doesn’t allow you to switch the app between free and not free like the iTunes App Store does, so I cannot release it for free during a short promotional period like I did for the iOS platform.

After a sufficient period (a few days, perhaps) of no reports of it crashing, I will promote the Android version heavily.