With more than 2.5 billion active devices based on Android, Google's mobile operating system is now one of the most widely used in the world.Despite all the efforts made by Google to constantly improve the security of the entire Android ecosystem, there are still several problems that remain unresolved. In this thesis, we analyse in detail some of the open problems that affect different components and players that are part of and contribute to the Android ecosystem. We start with the security analysis of the network communication of Android applications, showing how, even if Android provides several techniques to secure network communications, developers sometimes are still forced to use cleartext protocols. Our study continues with the ana...