Migration from Expo's push notification system

Hi,

Great job with Expo! I’m using Expo’s push notification system at the moment and have 10,000+ registered users and have stored their Expo push notification tokens.

If I were to decide to migrate to OneSignal (or some other push notification service), I’m wondering if there’s a way to access the underlying Android/Apple tokens rather than the Expo token?

I’m impressively unfamiliar with Push Notifications so apologies if this question is ridiculous! Great as Expo is, I’m conscious I don’t want thousands of our users tied into one ecosystem without an eject button.

Thanks in advance for any help :slight_smile:

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hey, if you want to use a third party notification service, i believe you would have to detach your app.

for accessing the native push tokens, there is an (unofficial) api in expo that lets you access them

seems similar to this question if you want to check out a more detailed explanation

Hey, thanks for the reply.

I may have misunderstood but my understanding of that other question was that it was with respect to obtaining the native Android/Apple tokens from within the app.

I’ve already collected 10,000+ expo push notification tokens that I’m wondering if they can be converted to the Android/Apple tokens that I (presume) are stored internally by Expo somewhere?

@tomwasd We don’t have an automatic / self-serve way to get the underlying tokens but if you needed the native iOS & Android device tokens we could get them for you. It’d take us some time to query them from the DB and we’d only give tokens for standalone apps that you created and own.

Thanks :slight_smile: Appreciate the reply and great to know that’s something the Expo Team would be open to. Do you know if an automated/self-serve way is in the pipeline? Guessing it’s probably not top of the feature list :grin:

Yeah, it’s not something we have planned since we’re prioritizing other APIs and quality improvements. But philosophically we want developers to be comfortable using Expo and use it because they want to.

Hi! We’re in a similar position - we used Expo to grow and are now at a point where we have detached and need to use a third party push notification vendor.

Who can we contact to get an export of the original tokens and how can we buy that person a beer/chocolates/pizza/flowers for their troubles? :slight_smile:

Hi there - I have the same request as @martsie and @tomwasd. How can I get in touch with the Expo team to make it happen? Thanks!