With the first mobile devices running Google’s Android coming shortly, the development community at large seems apprehensive about the platform. After all, why develop for something that may or may not work when there is already a hot, new mobile platform out there, Apple’s iPhone, that has proven to be extremely successful? Well, the team behind the life update and emergency messaging application Life360 took the opposite approach.

“It was clear Android was going to be open,” Chris Hulls, a part of Life360’s core development team told me today. That openness and the fact that no details about Apple’s iPhone software development kit (SDK) were known at the end of last year when development of Life360 began led them to choose Android as a “concept car,” as Hulls puts it.

The bet paid off — literally. Life360 was chosen as one of the 10 winners of the first Android Development Challenge. The app, chosen from 50 finalists, won the team a $275,000 prize. Money which Hull says will go back into the development of the application.

You see, Life360 is far from complete. While it won the prize for its Android app, the service’s goal is to be on a variety of platforms serving as a backbone for messaging in times of crisis or for families hoping to keep track of one another. If someone is injured in an accident or a natural disaster occurs, Life360 wants to be your lifeline to people that can help.

For example, if you’re in an emergency, you could push a panic button that you designate on your phone and have it place a pin on a map using your GPS coordinates, and send out an alert to your emergency contacts to let you know where you are and that you’re in distress.

This sounds a bit like how some people have been using the micro-messaging service Twitter in times of need. In fact, one man had the idea to try and build an emergency network with Twitter as its backbone.

But Life360 may be better suited for such tasks, because that would be a primary focus. But it’s not all about emergencies — the team is working on ways for families to keep track of one another more reasily. For example, you could send your child out and know where they are and that they are safe. That starts to create privacy questions, but many parents would like such functionality.

The team likes to think of what it’s creating as a “passive social network.” That is, a network that is continuously running in the background, but only used when you really need it.

The whole “running in the background” element is exactly why Life360 works on Android, but would not work on the iPhone. The iPhone currently does not allow any application to run in the background. But that’s how Life360 needs to work — Hulls knows that no one will want to keep it open 24/7, and it’s not meant to work that way.

He says he is intrigued, however, by Apple’s upcoming Push Notification Service, which will give at least some background operations to applications. It’s still not clear how well that will work, but Hulls is optimistic that Life360 will comes to the iPhone soon.

Perhaps the most surprising things Hulls revealed in our conversation though is that Life360 won the Android Developer Challenge despite never having seen a phone running Android or even a prototype! The entire thing was built and tested using the computer emulator.

After being selected as one of the 50 finalists for the challenge, Hulls was certain that his team would get some handsets to work with. But that never happened.