How do I find out what app is showing a toast?

Question

Several times a day my Android phone (Samsung Galaxy A51, Android 11) is showing this toast

We're having trouble connecting. Check your network connection and try again.

If I stay offline this toast will return every few minutes. How can I find out which app is posting these toasts. And most importantly how do I get rid of them? Long-pressing the toast doesn't show anything.

Answer 1

You can use Android's adb tool:

adb shell uiautomator events

Make sure you have USB Debugging enabled on your device. Connect your device to a computer and open a terminal to run the above adb command.

Running this command will dump out system events - you will get a LOT of information.

For example, here's a Toast I created by setting an alarm with the Clock app:

11-27 16:31:32.510 EventType: TYPE_ANNOUNCEMENT; EventTime: 6865213; PackageName: com.google.android.deskclock; MovementGranularity: 0; Action: 0 [ ClassName: android.view.ViewGroup; Text: [Alarm set for 15 hours and 59 minutes from now.]; ContentDescription: null; ItemCount: -1; CurrentItemIndex: -1; IsEnabled: true; IsPassword: false; IsChecked: false; IsFullScreen: false; Scrollable: false; BeforeText: null; FromIndex: -1; ToIndex: -1; ScrollX: -1; ScrollY: -1; MaxScrollX: -1; MaxScrollY: -1; AddedCount: -1; RemovedCount: -1; ParcelableData: null ]; recordCount: 0

Note the app in question is listed under PackageName as com.google.android.deskclock;. This should give you a good idea which app the Toast has originated from.

Answer 2

You could use the Toast Source app for that. It not only integrates the app icon and name with each toast message (first screenshot below), but also gives you a history of toasts you received and which app sent it:

^{Toast Source (source: Google Play; click images for larger variants)}

Quite privacy friendly it doesn't even require the Internet permission (so no ads either). But as it uses accessibility services, it's unclear whether it will survice Googles current purge.

Answer 3

Using the Toaster app I found out that the toasts were coming from SmartThings app. I have no idea what this app is for and I'm certainly not using it. In the settings I managed to uninstall it and I assume this will stop it from spamming me with toasts.