Issue #5 — “The Mystery of the Missing Toast”
Issue #5 — “The Mystery of the Missing Toast”
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I’m your host, Lady Daisy Bug — part test whisperer, part bug wrangler, and full-time believer in thoughtful testing. Each issue will blend bite-sized insights, automation tips, and a little QA storytelling to brighten your day (and your pipelines).
Let’s squash some bugs — and do it in style.
🌟 Bug of the Week: The Mystery of the Missing Toast
Story:
One of my Android UI tests was supposed to verify this simple user flow:
User taps “Submit” →
A success toast message appears: “Form submitted!” ✅
Except… my automation kept failing. Over. And over. Again.
“Toast element not found.”
“Timeout after 5 seconds.”
“AssertionError: expected toast not visible.”
I manually tested the app. The toast was right there — fast, subtle, but present.
So why couldn’t my test see it?
Symptoms:
- Appium could tap and submit just fine.
- The toast was visible to the human eye, but not to Appium.
- Adding sleep didn’t help. Increasing wait time didn’t help.
Root Cause:
Toast messages are transient, and they don’t exist in the regular UI hierarchy.
They’re rendered via a WindowManager overlay — meaning tools like Appium or Espresso can’t locate them directly, especially on non-rooted devices or emulators.
To make matters worse, the test was checking too late — the toast had already vanished by the time the locator even executed.
How I cracked it:
- Recorded the screen with adb shell screenrecord during test execution.
- Played the recording back — there it was! My toast, mocking me.
- Switched from searching for the toast directly to capturing it via log monitoring.
Fix:
Instead of using find_element on the toast, I listened for the toast text in logcat like this:
adb logcat -e "Form submitted!" | grep Toast
Or in Python:
import subprocess
def toast_message_present(toast_text):
output = subprocess.getoutput("adb logcat -d")
return toast_text in output
📌 Lesson: Just because you can see it doesn’t mean Appium can. And toast is the ninja of UI feedback — fast, silent, and nearly invisible.
🧪 Test Garden Tip: Strategies for Toast Detection
🔥 Quick summary of how to handle toast messages in tests:
✅ Don’t rely on visual matchers. Instead:
- Use logcat filtering for the toast string.
- If you’re on Espresso, you can use onView(withText("...")).inRoot(isToast()) — but only with root access or custom matchers.
✅ Keep in mind:
- Toasts usually last 2–3 seconds.
- They don’t have resource IDs or accessibility locators.
- They’re often OS-dependent in how they’re rendered.
🧪 Bonus: If your app uses custom snackbars or alert banners instead of native toasts, you can automate those.
💬 Lady’s Log
“Automation doesn’t have eyes. It has strategy.”✱
Some UI elements were never meant to be tested the usual way. That’s where creative testing begins — screen recorders, logs, or maybe… watching it with your own two eyes.
In QA, we don’t just write assertions. We observe. We improvise. And sometimes, we chase toast across a screen at 60 frames per second.
✱ If you have a mobile test or dev lab with real devices, you might want to try Valet — an AI-native computer-vision-driven automation tool by Jason Huggins. It automates the scenarios that realistically only a team of manual testers can handle.
— 𝓛𝓪𝓭𝔂 𝓓𝓪𝓲𝓼𝔂 𝓑𝓾𝓰 🐞🌼
📚 Petal Picks
- 📋 “Validating Android Toast Messages” — Appium Pro #64
- 🎬 Tool: adb shell screenrecord
- 📖 Snackbars & Toasts — Material Design Guidelines
💌 Coming Soon in Issue #6:
“The Case of the Phantom Tap”
My test tapped the button. The logs said it tapped the button.
But the app… did nothing.
Was it lag? A double-tap? Or just a ghost in the automation?