However useful logging may be during development, it can represent a security risk in the sense that, if not done carefully, an application may leak sensitive information to an attacker with access to the device, through malware or a repackaged application acting on behalf on the attacker. Log.v(): to log everything, full verbosity.įinally there is the Log.wtf() level, which stands for “what a terrible failure” (yeah right!), this level is for when something goes absolutely and terribly wrong,for instance when you get errors you are not supposed to.

Log.d(): to log for debugging purposes of minor events.

Log.i(): to log useful information about the app behavior.Log.w(): to log warnings, anything strange, but not precisely an error.

There are different levels of logging which indicate levels of priority and verbosity, they go from ERROR, WARN, INFO, DEBUG and VERBOSE: Logging gives developers the ability to keep track of application events, errors, debug information and virtually anything that the developer wants to put in there, this is a very useful feature while developing the application, since it provides a way to understand application behavior under specific circumstances, for instance, logging exception details may help you debugging an application is crash, logging request and responses may help you understand server side behavior, logging user input can help in refining input validation, among others. In this case we will be using logcat a command-line tool that dumps a log of system messages, including stack traces from errors and messages written from an application using the Log class. In this article we will see what the Android log is, what is it used for, what are the different logging levels and what security concerns may arise from misusing this feature.

Android studio logcat not showing