Our team is currently facing a number of issues/questions regarding implementing Push Notifications.
We are building an app for a university. They want to notify their students on new grades (personal) or alert school-wide (grouped). Firebase allows for an easy implementation of both and the school already has a Firebase service in place for this.
However, reading the Expo SDK, forum posts and questions we came to the following conclusion and questions:
As we are handling with sensitive data of a university, how do we know that Expo treats this right and is secure? It is a black box currently.
With Firebase you have an SLA and can get support from Google regarding issues, how does this work with Expo?
When the Expo Push service is down we are stuck with no notifications, since we already see some issues with Expo builds this is quite a big worry for us.
Is it correct that we can implement FCM only for Android at this time, without ejecting?
We really want to prevent having to eject our app, since we worry that we would lose quite some velocity on developing the app quickly.
Do you have any suggestions that might make it possible? Or do we have to wait until there is a way to use FCM together with Android and iOS (without ejecting)
Hi @dept! Figured I’d respond here as well in case anyone else had the same question(s)
We cover a few of these questions in our push notification FAQ, specifically how Expo treats the data in push notifications. Here are just a few highlights:
notifications are only stored in memory for as long as it takes to forward it along to FCM or APNS
notification content is never stored in a database
For anyone searching for a DPA- please send an email to secure@expo.io and we’re happy to send one over!
Finally, regarding uptime, we don’t publish SLAs, but are comfortable saying we maintain at least 99.9% uptime (our push notification Expo-caused failure rate in practice is very low, under 0.001%). Our goal is to provide developers with powerful and reliable tools, and work closely with our users to make sure that their needs and expectations are being met (or better yet, exceeded), so if you see any issues you think may be related to our services, definitely reach out to us and we can help identify and fix the issue if it’s on our end!
Is it correct that we can implement FCM only for Android at this time, without ejecting?