SOAP Requests with Android!

Hi
I’m predominately an iOS developer outside of my day job and currently running through various tutorials, books etc on Android dev and have the possibility of working on an app for both iOS and Android that involves some .Net web service connections via SOAP/XML

I have some test web services working fine with iOS using NSURLSession etc and have been trying to get a basic connection working with Android but there seem to be numerous different ways. I’ve had a play around with Volley and kSoap but they both feel as though they are 3rd party frameworks and Android doesn’t have its own built in framework like NSURLSession etc…that can’t be true can it?

A lot of the examples seem to be geared towards JSON services so its tricky finding examples showing the setup of HTTP headers, body etc and UTF-8 encoding

Can anyone point me in the right direction, I don’t mind digging around (been doing plenty of that!) but just want to be sure i’m on the right track for the SOAP connection stuff

Many Thanks
Steve