This is a collection of FAQs and common issues when setting up push notifications with Expo. This document covers the expo-notifications client-side library, as well as Expo's push notification service.

There is no cost associated with sending notifications through Expo's classic push notification service. EAS Notify, a push notification service with new features coming in 2021, will be part of EAS's pricing plans.

We don't impose any limit on the number of push notifications you can send. For best results, we do recommend you add throttling (handled automatically in the expo-server-sdk-node) and retry logic to your server.

Total notifications is much less important than your maximum notification throughput—how many notifications you send per second at peak. If this number is more than a couple hundred, reach out to us because we'd love to hear about what you're working on!

You should read all the relevant guides (this won't take longer than 10 minutes):

No, you can use any push notification service for both managed and bare workflow apps. The getDevicePushTokenAsync method from expo-notifications allows you to get the native device push token, which you can then use with other services, or even send your notifications through APNs and FCM directly.

That being said, we think sending notifications through Expo is the fastest and easiest way to do it, and millions of notifications are sent through Expo every day.

Push notifications have a lot of moving parts, so this can be due to a wide variety of reasons. To narrow things down, check the push ticket and push receipt for error messages. This information (and maybe a little bit of Googling) will help narrow down the problem so that you can solve it.

You can also narrow things even further by testing local notifications in your app. This will ensure all of your client-side logic is correct, and narrow things down to the server side or app credentials.

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST "https://exp.host/--/api/v2/push/send" -d '{
  "to": "ExponentPushToken[xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]",
  "title":"hello",
  "body": "world"
}'

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST "https://exp.host/--/api/v2/push/getReceipts" -d '{
  "ids": [
    "XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX"
  ]
}'

The ExpoPushToken will remain the same across app upgrades, and ejecting to the bare workflow. On iOS, it will also remain the same even after uninstalling the app and reinstalling (on Android, this results in the push token changing). It will also change if you change your applicationId or experienceId (usually @expoUsername/projectSlug).

The ExpoPushToken will never "expire" but if one of your users uninstalls the app, you'll receive a DeviceNotRegistered error back from Expo's servers, meaning you should stop sending notifications to this app.

This strongly indicates that you have either misconfigured your credentials, or didn't configure them at all. In the Expo Go app, you rely on Expo's credentials so that you don't need to worry about it, and setup is as easy as possible. But when you build your own app for the stores, you need to use your own credentials. On iOS, this is handled via your push key (revoking the push key associated with your app will result in your notifications failing to be delivered. To fix that, add a new push key with expo credentials:manager). On Android, all you need to do is follow this guide. Please note that after setting up Android FCM credentials, you will need to rebuild your app.

Expo abstracts the majority of credential management away so that you can focus on building your app, but if you want to understand it on a deeper level, read our guide to app signing.

This is likely due to the priority level of the notifications you're sending. You can learn more about Android priority here, but as for how it relates to Expo- Expo accepts four priorities:

And setting the priority to high gives your notification the greatest likelihood that the Android OS will display the notification.

Expo does not store the contents of push notifications any longer than it takes to deliver the notifications to the push notification services operated by Apple, Google, etc... Push notifications are stored only in memory and in message queues and not stored in databases.

Expo does not read or share the contents of push notifications and our services keep push notifications only as long as needed to deliver them to push notification services run by Apple and Google. If the Expo team is actively debugging the push notifications service, we may see notification contents (ex: at a breakpoint) but Expo cannot see push notification contents otherwise.

Expo's connections to Apple and Google are encrypted and use HTTPS.

When your push notification credentials have expired, run expo credentials:manager -p ios which will provide a list of actions to choose from. Select the removal of your expired credentials and then select "Add new Push Notifications Key".

Expo makes a best effort to deliver notifications to the push notification services operated by Apple and Google. Expo's infrastructure is designed for at-least-once delivery to the underlying push notification services; it is more likely for a notification to be delivered to Apple or Google more than once rather than not at all, though both are uncommon but possible.

After a notification has been handed off to an underlying push notification service, Expo creates a "push receipt" that records whether the handoff was successful; a push receipt denotes whether the underlying push notification service received the notification.

Finally, the push notification services from Apple, Google, etc... make a best effort to deliver the notification to the device according to their own policies.

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