Display a popup toast

Learn how to create a toast popup in an Expo project.

What is a toast

Toasts are the standard technique in mobile development for notifying your users about something without interrupting what they are doing.

According to the Android Developers Documentation: "A toast provides simple feedback about an operation in a small popup. It only fills the amount of space required for the message and the current activity remains visible and interactive. Toasts automatically disappear after a timeout".

To present a toast, we recommend two solutions: an API from the react-native package and a library maintained by the React Native community.

Android-only: ToastAndroid

Toasts are a native feature of Android, but iOS doesn't have this by default. If you only need toasts on Android, you can use the ToastAndroid API provided by React Native.

Usage

To show a basic toast with ToastAndroid, import ToastAndroid from the 'react-native' package and call ToastAndroid.show with a message and duration option:

import React from 'react';
import { View, StyleSheet, ToastAndroid, Button, StatusBar } from 'react-native';

export default function App() {
  function showToast() {
    ToastAndroid.show('Request sent successfully!', ToastAndroid.SHORT);
  }

  return (
    <View style={styles.container}>
      <Button title="Show Toast" onPress={showToast} />
    </View>
  );
}

const styles = StyleSheet.create({
  container: {
    flex: 1,
    justifyContent: 'center',
    paddingTop: StatusBar.currentHeight,
    backgroundColor: '#6638f0',
    padding: 8,
  },
});

The code above results in this on a Pixel 3a:

There are many other ways to configure your toast position, duration, and gravity options. Read the React Native ToastAndroid docs to learn more.

Cross-platform: react-native-root-toast

Since iOS doesn't have a built-in toast feature, React Native developers have to implement their own cross-platform toast libraries. react-native-root-toast is one such solution that the developer has shared with the React Native community.

We recommend this solution because it's one of the most used and maintained open-source libraries that work on Android and iOS without the need for native code. It also provides a lot of customization options, which means that you will be able to match the design of your toasts to the rest of your app.

Usage

To use react-native-root-toast, you have to install the module from npm with npm install react-native-root-toast.

Next, you must wrap the root component of your app with <RootSiblingParent> to allow toasts in any part of your app.

import { RootSiblingParent } from 'react-native-root-siblings';

// in your render function
return (
  <RootSiblingParent>{/* <- use RootSiblingParent to wrap your root component */}
    <App />
  </RootSiblingParent>
);

Then, anywhere in your app, you can import Toast from 'react-native-root-toast'; and call Toast.show and Toast.hide to manage toasts on your screen.

// Add a Toast on screen.
let toast = Toast.show('Request failed to send.', {
  duration: Toast.durations.LONG,
});

// You can manually hide the Toast, or it will automatically disappear after a `duration` ms timeout.
setTimeout(function hideToast() {
  Toast.hide(toast);
}, 500);

react-native-root-toast also has a component API if you want to manage your toasts declaratively.

<Toast visible={this.state.visible}>Thanks for subscribing!</Toast>

This library has many options for customizing the appearance and behavior of your toast. See the package repository to learn more.