HTTP Network Requests on Android Pie

Recently when I started work on a new app for my company I noticed that all of my requests were being rejected before even reaching the server. This was a problem I was facing only on the emulator and not on the Nexus 5 I had for physical testing. I searched on the Internet a bit and found out that Android Pie has disabled cleartext network traffic by default.

I found 2 solutions for this. You can either enable cleartext traffic from your app for specific domains or you can set it for all the domains.

Enabling cleartext traffic for all domains (discouraged due to being less secure)

Add this attribute to the <application> tag in your AndroidManifest.xml

android:usesCleartextTraffic="true"

This will enable app-wide cleartext traffic for any and all domains to which your app makes a request.

This is discouraged as you don’t specifically allow only the domains that require cleartext.

Enabling HTTP requests for specific domains (go for this one if you can)

You first need to create a file named network_security_config.xml file inside your res/xml directory. The file contents should be as below

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<network-security-config>
    <domain-config cleartextTrafficPermitted="true">
        <domain includeSubdomains="true">example-domain.com</domain>
    </domain-config>
</network-security-config>

You need to replace example-domain.com with the domain for which you want to enable http traffic. If you want to enable http for more than one domains then add relevant <domain> tags for each.

Then you need to specify this file in your AndroidManifest.xml as below:

...
<application
    ...
    android:networkSecurityConfig="@xml/network_security_config">
...

That’s all folks

I faced this issue at work and now I am writing about it so others (and also me) can benefit from it in future. If you have more such ideas/examples or any other suggestions under the sky, contact me or tweet to me @varun_barad.