How to SHA1 hash a string in Android?

You don't need andorid for this. You can just do it in simple java.

Have you tried a simple java example and see if this returns the right sha1.

import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
import java.security.MessageDigest;
import java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException;

public class AeSimpleSHA1 {
    private static String convertToHex(byte[] data) {
        StringBuilder buf = new StringBuilder();
        for (byte b : data) {
            int halfbyte = (b >>> 4) & 0x0F;
            int two_halfs = 0;
            do {
                buf.append((0 <= halfbyte) && (halfbyte <= 9) ? (char) ('0' + halfbyte) : (char) ('a' + (halfbyte - 10)));
                halfbyte = b & 0x0F;
            } while (two_halfs++ < 1);
        }
        return buf.toString();
    }

    public static String SHA1(String text) throws NoSuchAlgorithmException, UnsupportedEncodingException {
        MessageDigest md = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-1");
        byte[] textBytes = text.getBytes("iso-8859-1");
        md.update(textBytes, 0, textBytes.length);
        byte[] sha1hash = md.digest();
        return convertToHex(sha1hash);
    }
}

Also share what your expected sha1 should be. Maybe ObjectC is doing it wrong.

If you can get away with using Guava it is by far the simplest way to do it, and you don't have to reinvent the wheel:

final HashCode hashCode = Hashing.sha1().hashString(yourValue, Charset.defaultCharset());

You can then take the hashed value and get it as a byte[], as an int, or as a long.

No wrapping in a try catch, no shenanigans. And if you decide you want to use something other than SHA-1, Guava also supports sha256, sha 512, and a few I had never even heard about like adler32 and murmur3.

A simpler SHA-1 method: (updated from the commenter's suggestions, also using a massively more efficient byte->string algorithm)

String sha1Hash( String toHash )
{
    String hash = null;
    try
    {
        MessageDigest digest = MessageDigest.getInstance( "SHA-1" );
        byte[] bytes = toHash.getBytes("UTF-8");
        digest.update(bytes, 0, bytes.length);
        bytes = digest.digest();

        // This is ~55x faster than looping and String.formating()
        hash = bytesToHex( bytes );
    }
    catch( NoSuchAlgorithmException e )
    {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    catch( UnsupportedEncodingException e )
    {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return hash;
}

// http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9655181/convert-from-byte-array-to-hex-string-in-java
final protected static char[] hexArray = "0123456789ABCDEF".toCharArray();
public static String bytesToHex( byte[] bytes )
{
    char[] hexChars = new char[ bytes.length * 2 ];
    for( int j = 0; j < bytes.length; j++ )
    {
        int v = bytes[ j ] & 0xFF;
        hexChars[ j * 2 ] = hexArray[ v >>> 4 ];
        hexChars[ j * 2 + 1 ] = hexArray[ v & 0x0F ];
    }
    return new String( hexChars );
}