Mobile applications have become very popular in the last few years thanks to a huge increment in the use of mobile devices. From a developer's point of view, Android has become an important source of income thanks to the different app repositories, such as Google Play and Amazon Appstore.
With an increase in the number of applications available, users have become more demanding about the features of the applications they are going to use. A solid testing of the application and its security aspects are the key factors in the pursuit of success for an application. Bugs and security issues are obviously not features that help your application do well in the increasingly more exigent market of Android.
In this book, you are going to learn how to turn your Android application into a solidly debugged and secure application. To achieve this, you will learn how to use Android Studio and its most important features: testing and security.
Chapter 1, Introduction to Software Security, introduces the principles of software security.
Chapter 2, Security in Android Applications, describes the distinctive features found in mobile environments and the Android system.
Chapter 3, Monitoring Your Application, presents the debugging environment, one of the most important features of an IDE.
Chapter 4, Mitigating Vulnerabilities, describes the measures that should be taken to prevent attacks.
Chapter 5, Preserving Data Privacy, presents the mechanisms offered by Android to preserve the privacy of user data.
Chapter 6, Securing Communications, explains the mechanisms offered by Android to secure communications between an Android application and an external server.
Chapter 7, Authentication Methods, presents different types of authentication methods used in Android mobile devices.
Chapter 8, Testing Your Application, introduces ways to test an application using Android Studio.
Chapter 9, Unit and Functional Tests, covers unit and functional tests that allow developers to quickly verify the state and behavior of an activity on its own.
Chapter 10, Supporting Tools, presents a set of external tools different from Android Studio to help developers test an Android application.
Chapter 11, Further Considerations, provides some further considerations that are useful for developers.
For this book, you need a computer with a Windows, Mac OS, or Linux system. You will also need to have Java and the Android Studio IDE installed on your system.
This book is a guide for developers with some Android knowledge, but who do not know how to test their applications using Android Studio. This book is suitable for developers who have knowledge about software security but not about security in mobile applications, and also for developers who do not have any knowledge about software security. It's assumed that you are familiar with Android and it is also recommended to be familiar with the Android Studio IDE.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that will help you distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "To send an ordered broadcast, you can call the sendOrderedBroadcast method."
A block of code is set as follows:
Instrumentation.ActivityMonitor monitor = getInstrumentation().addMonitor(SecondActivity.class.getName(), null, false);
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
@Override
protected void setUp() throws Exception {
super.setUp();
Intent intent = new Intent(getInstrumentation().getTargetContext(), MainActivity.class);
startActivity(intent, null, null);
mActivity = getActivity();Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
adb shell monkey –p com.packt.package –v 100
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The multiplication is made when the Button1 button is clicked."
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