Monitor network activity in Android Phones

TCPDUMP is one of my favourite tools for analyzing network, but if you find difficult to cross-compile tcpdump for android, I'd recomend you to use some applications from the market.

These are the applications I was talking about:

• Shark: Is small version of wireshark for Android phones). This program will create a *.pcap and you can read the file on PC with wireshark.
• Shark Reader : This program allows you to read the *.pcap directly in your Android phone.

Shark app works with rooted devices, so if you want to install it, be sure that you have your device already rooted.

Good luck ;)

If you are doing it from the emulator you can do it like this:

Run emulator -tcpdump emulator.cap -avd my_avd to write all the emulator's traffic to a local file on your PC and then open it in wireshark

There is a similar post that might help HERE

Note: tcpdump requires root privileges, so you'll have to root your phone if not done already. Here's an ARM binary of tcpdump (this works for my Samsung Captivate). If you prefer to build your own binary, instructions are here (yes, you'd likely need to cross compile).

Also, check out Shark For Root (an Android packet capture tool based on tcpdump).

I don't believe tcpdump can monitor traffic by specific process ID. The strace method that Chris Stratton refers to seems like more effort than its worth. It would be simpler to monitor specific IPs and ports used by the target process. If that info isn't known, capture all traffic during a period of process activity and then sift through the resulting pcap with Wireshark.