Emulator sends get request to google every time at startup

Question

I launched burp as an emulator's proxy for debugging of http requests from my application with intercepting option switched on and at the startup I found that emulator sends a GET request to google:

GET /generate_204 HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Dalvik/1.6.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.3; sdk Build/JWR66V)
Host: 173.194.32.129
Connection: Keep-Alive
Accept-Encoding: gzip

And gets a response like:

HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Thu, 05 Sep 2013 06:56:51 GMT
Server: GFE/2.0

So I would like to know if there is some purpose for making this request to google at the startup?

Answer 1

It's most likely for counting things:

• active developers
• emulator use
• framework use
• generating statistics how developers are spread over the world
• ...

Answer 2

It's Android trying to tell if the Wifi (or other network connection) connection has internet. I'm testing on real devices and it does the same thing. If you don't forward the message the connection status in Android Wifi Setting will say "Connected. No internet" until you forward and it gets a success back.