Push Notifications

Push notifications are messages sent from your server to a user’s device and displayed by the operating system, even when your React Native app is not running. Your server never talks to the phone directly: it goes through the platform’s delivery service.

• APNs (Apple Push Notification service) delivers to iPhones and iPads.
• FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging) delivers to Android devices with Google Play Services.

The flow is always the same. The app asks for permission, registers with the platform, and receives a device token. You send that token to your backend, which later calls APNs or FCM with the token and a payload.

In React Native the usual options are expo-notifications, which works with Expo’s push service (one ExponentPushToken that fans out to APNs and FCM) or with raw native tokens, and @react-native-firebase/messaging, often paired with Notifee for rich local display.

const { status } = await Notifications.requestPermissionsAsync();
const token = (await Notifications.getExpoPushTokenAsync({ projectId })).data;

Gotchas that cost people days:

• iOS needs the Push Notifications capability, which adds the aps-environment entitlement and must be in your provisioning profile, plus an APNs key uploaded to whoever sends the pushes.
• Android 13 and later require the runtime notification permission; older versions granted it silently.
• Expo Go is not a reliable test bed: remote push on Android is no longer supported there. Use a development build.
• Foreground behaviour is opt-in. By default a notification arriving while the app is open may not be shown; you decide with a handler such as setNotificationHandler.
• Tokens change. Refresh and re-send them on every launch rather than storing one forever.

See the Expo push notifications guide.