Push Notifications are an important feature to, as “growth hackers” would say, retain and re-engage users and monetize on their attention, or something. From my point of view it’s just super handy to know when a relevant event happens in an app so I can jump back into it and read more. Let’s look at how to do this with Expo. Spoiler alert: it’s almost too easy.

Note: iOS and Android simulators cannot receive push notifications. To test them out you will need to use a real-life device. Additionally, when calling Permissions.askAsync on the simulator, it will resolve immediately with “undetermined” as the status, regardless of whether you choose to allow or not.

There are three main steps to wiring up push notifications:

• sending a user’s Expo Push Token to your server
• calling Expo’s Push API with the token when you want to send a notification
• and responding to receiving and/or selecting the notification in your app (for example to jump to a particular screen that the notification refers to).

In order to send a push notification to somebody, we need to know about their device. Sure, we know our user’s account information, but Apple, Google, and Expo do not understand what devices correspond to “Brent” in your proprietary user account system. Expo takes care of identifying your device with Apple and Google through the Expo push token, which is unique each time an app is installed on a device. All we need to do is send this token to your server so you can associate it with the user account and use it in the future for sending push notifications.

import { Permissions, Notifications } from 'expo';

const PUSH_ENDPOINT = 'https://your-server.com/users/push-token';

async function registerForPushNotificationsAsync() {
  const { status: existingStatus } = await Permissions.getAsync(
    Permissions.NOTIFICATIONS
  );
  let finalStatus = existingStatus;

  // only ask if permissions have not already been determined, because
  // iOS won't necessarily prompt the user a second time.
  if (existingStatus !== 'granted') {
    // Android remote notification permissions are granted during the app
    // install, so this will only ask on iOS
    const { status } = await Permissions.askAsync(Permissions.NOTIFICATIONS);
    finalStatus = status;
  }

  // Stop here if the user did not grant permissions
  if (finalStatus !== 'granted') {
    return;
  }

  // Get the token that uniquely identifies this device
  let token = await Notifications.getExpoPushTokenAsync();

  // POST the token to your backend server from where you can retrieve it to send push notifications.
  return fetch(PUSH_ENDPOINT, {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
      Accept: 'application/json',
      'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    },
    body: JSON.stringify({
      token: {
        value: token,
      },
      user: {
        username: 'Brent',
      },
    }),
  });
}

Push notifications have to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is your server, probably (you could write a command line tool to send them if you wanted, it’s all the same). When you’re ready to send a push notification, grab the Expo push token off of the user record and send it over to the Expo API using a plain old HTTPS POST request. We’ve taken care of wrapping that for you in a few languages: