Is it possible to replace the push message service with 3rd party one?

[gregbenner]

The push messages are failing left right and center for google and now apple.
What is the possibility of user Pusher or some 3rd party directly without ejecting?

I also can’t figure out upgrading the SDK26 so Firebase Messaging seems out of reach. See Upgrade to SDK 26 from SDK 25 - #4 by gregbenner for more details or lack of help.

Our business model is around push, and I fear my job is at risk if I stick with expo push notifications.
Please help!

[arcomito]

I’ve seen this asked here as well: [expo] Is it possible to use Pusher (https://pusher.com) instead of Expo Notification and Expo Backend?

I think this guy says he has:

Implement push notification on mobile and browser

We currently use Pusher on our Expo client and web app (the pusher-js library) and it works well enough, but there’s a number of other web-sockets-as-a-service platforms, as well. I definitely recommend using one for sending a message from server to client while the app is open, and saving mobile OS push notifications for only when you would want to put a notification in the user’s notification tray/ lock screen. A service like Pusher can be faster than OS push notifications, you can use them ev…

Maybe somebody at expo can chime in though.

[llamaluvr]

Pusher does not replace Expo push notifications. I repeat, Pusher- or Firebase subscriptions - or HubNub- or Socket.io***- or your home-grown web socket solution- does not replace Expo (or stock iOS or stock Android) push notifications.

As you scale, you probably want both of these things.

You need stock OS (or Expo, which just an abstraction for stock OS) push notifications to send notifications when your app is not open. If you want something to pop up on somebody’s lock screen when they get a new message, you need Expo push notifications, or you need to detach and use stock OS notifications or somebody else’s abstraction over the stock push notification API’s built by Apple and Google.

You probably want web sockets (via Pusher or whatever else) to automatically refresh data based on changes to data on your server when your app is open. You don’t want to force your user to refresh manually just to check if there are new messages in a chat feed. You want the messages to appear automatically. Web sockets let your app listen for changes from the server while the app is open. They do not work when the app is closed. Now, you can also listen to Expo push notifications when the app is open, so you could skate by listening for those and not using web sockets, but Expo/ OS push notifications are not guaranteed to be delivered and are generally slower than sockets, so it’s not ideal for triggering refresh when your app is open.

*** I haven’t checked exhaustively and each of these services might also have a push notification service that does abstract the OS-level push notification API (just like Expo), but their web socket solutions that you can call easily within a non-detached Expo project do not replace Expo push notifications.