We are making HttpURLConnection based request to the Web server using HTTP Basic Authentication.
Code works great on Android versions 2.x, 3.x., 4.0.x Now with Jelly Bean an
For a 401 UNAUTHORIZED response with Android's httpURLConnection your server must send back a authenticate header like this...
WWW-Authenticate: Bogus realm="blahblah", comment="use form to log in"
as per
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616
search "10.4.2 401 Unauthorized"