

It also makes working with an app easier because of the project like file structure and automation of some repetitive tasks like building apk, etc. It can decode resources to the nearly original form and rebuild them after making some modifications. apktool - A tool for reverse engineering 3rd party, closed, binary Android apps.With these tools I was able to interact with the APK file I downloaded from the internet: If Charles does not fit your needs (which can happen because of its trial format), I am sure you could use the free alternative Fiddler and achieve the same results. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information). Charles - Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all the HTTP and SSL / HTTPS traffic between their machine and the Internet.I decided to use Charles, due to some previous experience within the team:

NOTE: When installing, make sure you go through the custom installation flow and choose Android Virtual Device. For my solution, I used a Pixel 3 with Android 9.0 (Pie). You can select many devices and distributions.

This allowed me to use the proxying software: Charles.

Then I moved to a more flexible emulator, those provided by Android Studio. When trying to capture traffic, I discovered that today this application does not support adding custom certificates which render it useless for our purposes. The first step was to be able to use the application on my computer, for this I used Bluestacks.
