The emulator shipped with ADT is a great tool for both early stage framework development and late stage application development. A large majority of the Android emulator users will only use a small portion of the features for app development. For the developers working on distributed framework development, it is a necessity to be able to sniff emulator network traffic (no Wireshark can’t see the makeshift emulator router). Fortunately, the ADT developers provided two ways to accomplish this.

1) Using the telnet interface (start emulator first)

telnet localhost 5554
network capture start emulator.cap
-- Do Something Cool --
network capture stop

2) Using the emulator command line option

emulator -avd myavd -verbose -tcpdump emulator.cap

Afterwords, simply open the cap file with Wireshark. That’s it.