Another Tool In My Pocket

This is not going to be a long article or guide. I wanted to share a tool I started to use on my android device for API testing. One challenge I faced was the parsing of cookies. I am using json web tokens and storing them securely in a cookie, but the problem was finding something native to use on my android device. I tried a couple options before settling on the one that satisfied my needs.

Postman

I did not even look the way of postman web UI, I already had a bad experience of page loads and memory consumption. I did not even check to see if it resolves my issue.

Restfox

I liked restfox because it works offline and its a simple web interface and it’s compatible with postman it seemed a fine alternative. But there are limitations. It seems to want a specific kind of http response. I cannot make http requests of all types, it only works well when it text/json. I don’t want limitations because I like to explore different ways of doing things. I had to let it go.

Honourable Mentions

• hoppscotch: It is great tool, but it doesn’t allow the use of cookies seemlessly when testing your API. I’m speaking of the web version.
• Insomnia: Insomnia is great tool. When I had a laptop, that was what I used for testing my APIs. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a web UI.

What I Discovered - Reqable

What I love about reqable:

• It works offline.
• Has a native app.
• Nice on memory. Snappy and responsive.
• Auto management of cookies. It sets the cookies automatically and sends them on any request after that.
• It has collaboration mode. One collection, many users at the same time.
• It has history tracking, web app traffic monitoring. Yeah, I’m liking my new tool in the toolbox.
• It has metrics to checkout the latency of API responses with different sections.
• It has a certificate manager.

And there’s more.

All of this for 67 MB of storage after install. It’s a good bargain if you’d ask me.

Some Screenshots

API Response Screenshot

Sidebar Menu Screenshot

Metrics Screenshot

Certificate Manager Screenshot

Concluding Words

Reqable offered more than I wanted, and all the other features are useful to me as well. Anyone wanting to test their APIs on their android device, checkout reqable.

I’m not sponsored by them. I’m a simple guy. Build a good tool to solve my problem, I like, I support, I increase awareness, everybody happy.