**1. Introduction**

Nowadays, mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have become very popular, due to a reduction in their cost and an increase in their functionalities and services availability.

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Moreover, the growing trend of implementing bring your own device (BYOD) policies in organizations has also contributed to the adoption of these technologies, not only for everyday communication activities but to support enterprise systems, industrial applications, and commercial transactions, which raise new security issues. In this scenario, operating systems have also played an important role in the adoption and proliferation of mobile devices and applications, giving also space for the appearance of malicious software (malware). This is the case for the Android OS, which, due to its openness and free availability, has become not only a major stakeholder in the market of mobile devices but has also become an attractive target for cybercriminals.

Google, the Open Handset Alliance manufacturers, and the Android developers' community have made many efforts in order to improve Android's security. However, the emergence and evolution of new security threats continue being an important issue. Therefore, in this chapter, we advocate to present some current trends and results in the Android malware analysis and detection research area. We start by briefly describing the Android's security model, followed by a discussion of some static and dynamic malware analysis techniques in order to provide a general view to the analysis and detection processes to the reader. After that, a description of a particular set of software developments, which exemplify some of the discussed techniques, is presented accompanied by a set of practical results. Finally, a set of conclusions about the future development of the ideas explored in this chapter are drawn.
