There are cases when it is necessary to track the outgoing and incoming traffic related to Android applications. However, Android as a platform is not really friendly towards this kind of operations. The most common way I am analyzing the traffic that is targetting a mobile device is by setting an ad-hoc wireless network while my computer is connected to a wired connection. Both Windows Phone 7 and Android support connecting to secondary networks (aka ad-hoc), but Android doesn't support this by default.
So there are three choices I was thinking about:
Sniffing all WiFi packets for the needed data
Sniffing data from the emulator
Both ways had major limitations. Sniffing the general WiFi traffic would require additional configuration in my case. The emulator doesn't have the Marketplace and I don't have direct access to the APK. Or at least that's the default behavior.
Since my device is un-rootable and there is no way I could connect it to an ad-hoc network at this moment, I though that the emulator is the best way to go. So the first thing I though of is unlocking the default image to carry the Marketplace. This wasn't a complicated task, so I eventually enabled the Marketplace.
Read more: .NET Zone