Debug your android applications by capturing/monitoring their http traffic using wireshark

I’ve always wondered what my phone is telling the outside world and recently i had the need to actually find out as I’m developing an android app for work at the moment. I needed to find out what was going over the wire as i was getting some strange problems and could not debug the traffic on the production server.

Setup

Download and install wireshark : https://wireshark.org/

Disable wifi and mobile data on the phone.

Connect your phone to your laptop/desktop via USB.

Enable internet pass though. Basically you want your phones internet to come through the USB wire, through your computer network card, which when running a wireshark capture, through wireshark.

Set up a capture filter so that you only capture the data coming to and from your phone and not data initiated from the computer itself. i pick the option to ‘create a capture with detailed options’. Set a capture filter for example ‘host 192.168.15.129’,  where 192.168.15.129 is the ip address of the phone.

Additionally (or alternatively) you can filter the traffic by ip address after capture when viewing the results “ip.src==192.168.15.129 or ip.dst==192.168.15.129” where 192.168.15.129 is the ip address of your phone. Or filter the traffic by protocol, you probably care about http traffic so filter on this by entering “http” in the filter.

Results

You can get information overload with wireshark, it takes some getting used to, but if you dig you can find everything you need. Look for the requests you care about by looking down the info column and clicking the row. This will present all the packet details where you can dig as deep as you like into the request.

I use the Hypertext Transfer Protocol section as its the level of detail i care about. From here you can see the url and the headers as well as a link to the packet that contains the response, simply perfect.