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The answer could be subjective. The answer could be intuition. And I guess the answer could be found from the traditional modal versus non-modal debates.
But in general how do you generally decide which one to go for? What are their use cases?
Thanks.
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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.
The toast message is displayed only for few seconds. This in many cases will not be enough for the low vision and cognitive challenged users to read the content in the message. As I was researching, on Android the maximum length for displaying a toast message is 3.5 seconds. Author can set toast.
They're not like modal dialogs that block the entire screen. Toasts are placed along the edges and corners so that they don't block the center.
A Toast is mostly designed to inform the user of something that's not critical and that doesn't require interaction (and will fade by itself after a certain period of time like "Message saved"), so I'd use a Toast for just that. Also a Toast doesn't prevent the user from using the device/app, you can still activate e.g. underlying icons while the Toast is displayed. (This may depend on the device, but e.g. on the Droid this works.)
Dialogs mostly require the user to make a choice, or (like in a ProgressDialog) show a progress that doesn't require interaction but will keep the user from doing something else in the meantime, which can be important if e.g. you're doing calculations that would fail once the user changes the parameters before they are finished.
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