dumpsys dropbox

read-only

The platform's ring buffer of crashes, ANRs and tombstones — how you read ANR traces without root.

Command: adb shell dumpsys dropbox
Commands: System services (dumpsys)
Risk: read-only

Syntax

dumpsys dropbox [--print <tag>]

Flags and arguments

Token	Meaning
--print <tag>	Print the full text of every entry with that tag. Without a tag you get the index only, which is what you want first.

Examples

```
dumpsys dropbox
```
The index: one line per entry, no contents. Cheap.
```
dumpsys dropbox --print data_app_anr
```
The actual ANR traces, including the stacks.
```
dumpsys dropbox --print data_app_crash
```
Recent app crashes with their exceptions.

Reading the output

Sample output

Drop box contents: 96 entries
Max entries: 1000

2026-07-26 11:04:31 data_app_crash (text, 4321 bytes)
2026-07-26 11:41:02 data_app_anr (compressed text, 12043 bytes)
2026-07-26 12:00:00 SYSTEM_TOMBSTONE (data, 91234 bytes)

The index is a timestamp, a tag and a parenthesised note about how the entry is stored. The tag is the classification: `data_app_*` for user-installed apps, `system_app_*` for preinstalled ones, `*_anr` for an application-not-responding trace, `*_crash` for a Java exception, `*_native_crash` and `SYSTEM_TOMBSTONE` for a native one. The parenthesis is free-form and manufacturers reword it.

Output fields

Field	Meaning
Drop box contents: N entries	How many entries the buffer holds right now.
<date> <time> <tag>	When it happened, in the device's own time zone, and what kind of failure it was.
(text, N bytes)	Storage form and size. A size that cannot be read is unknown, not zero.
data_app_anr	An ANR in a user-installed app — the trace you would have looked for in /data/anr.
SYSTEM_TOMBSTONE	A native crash the system chose to keep.

Version and vendor notes

`/data/anr` is not readable by the shell user on a modern build, which is why this is the answer to "how do I read ANR traces without root": the same traces are in the drop box, and dumpsys will hand them over.
Never run `--print` without a tag. On a phone that has been up for a month the output can be tens of megabytes.
Tags are conventional rather than enumerated, and vendors add their own. An unfamiliar tag is still readable, just not classifiable.

We have a UI for this

Android ADB Toolbox runs this command over USB and parses what comes back — a Chromium browser, no SDK, nothing uploaded.

Open Android ADB Toolbox

Related commands

Commands that turn up in the same session as dumpsys dropbox.

Command	What it does
logcat	Streams the system log: the running commentary of everything happening on the phone.
dumpsys activity activities	Which app is in the foreground, and the task and stack structure behind it.
run-as	Runs a command as one app's own uid — the way to read a debug build's private files without root.

More System services (dumpsys) commands

Command	What it does
dumpsys battery	The battery service's live state: level, status, health, voltage and temperature.
dumpsys diskstats	Free space per partition, a disk write latency check, and a cached per-app breakdown of what is using storage.
dumpsys thermalservice	Whether the phone is throttling, and every thermal zone the hardware layer reports, in degrees Celsius.
dumpsys sensorservice	Every sensor the phone has, with its vendor, type, rates and batching — plus a buffer of recent readings.
dumpsys meminfo	Which processes are using the most memory, measured as proportional set size.
dumpsys package	Everything the package manager knows about one app: version, paths, flags, install source and per-user state.

Checked against AOSP, toybox and kernel sources while writing the parsers behind our Web ADB tools. Where a behaviour genuinely varies by Android version or manufacturer, this page says so instead of giving a number that would be wrong on half the phones out there.

Frequently asked questions

How do I run an adb shell command?

Switch on developer options and USB debugging on the phone, plug it in, then run `adb shell <command>` from a machine with platform-tools installed — or run `adb shell` on its own to get an interactive prompt and type the command without the prefix. If the command produces binary output, such as a screenshot, use `adb exec-out` instead of `adb shell`: the plain shell service attaches a terminal, which rewrites newline bytes and corrupts the data.

Do adb shell commands need root?

Not the ones on this reference. They run as the `shell` user, which can manage packages for its own Android user, read most `dumpsys` services, write the settings provider, inject input and read shared storage. Root is only needed for things this reference deliberately avoids — reading another app's private data (except through `run-as` on a debuggable build), writing system partitions, or reading `/data/anr` directly.

Why does the output look different on my phone?

Either the Android version or the manufacturer. Some flags and fields arrived in a specific release, and those are noted per command. The rest is OEM patching, which hits `dumpsys` hardest: a dump is debug output whose text is whatever the service author last printed, and manufacturers change it and backport their changes. Read fields by name rather than by position, and treat an unfamiliar shape as a difference rather than as a failure.

Can I run this from a browser instead of a terminal?

For many commands, yes — the Web ADB tools on this site talk to a phone over WebUSB from a Chromium-based desktop browser, with no SDK installed and nothing uploaded. Each page links to the tool that runs its command, when one exists. Two limits are worth knowing: only one program can hold the ADB interface at a time, so a desktop `adb server` has to be stopped first, and `adb forward` and `adb reverse` cannot work in a browser at all.

Would rather click than type? The Web ADB Toolkit runs commands like this from a browser over USB. Or browse every command.