Most of the gameplay was developed locally, without any backend. By the game I was sure I could get the gameplay right, I asked my friend to join me and work on the backend. So for the past 3 months more or less, we've been working on getting all of the endpoints right, and testing, testing, testing and more testing to make sure we could catch as many bugs as possible.
In terms of hours, we probably put in about 2 hours per day on weekdays and about an average of 5-10 hours during the weekends. In hindsight it looks like a LOT of time, but if you've ever done Android development, you probably know that the amount of time and effort that goes into testing the app on several devices, probably surpasses the actual development time.