Push notifications with standalone app on iOS

Expo SDK
1

Today I launched my app onto both the Apple and Android stores successfully. After launch though, none of my push notifications come through for my Apple device, but remain fine for my Android. During the submission process, I did check to use the Apple Push Notification Service, along with running the command exp fetch:ios:certs in my local project. What do I need to do to re-enable push notifications on my Apple devices ?

2

Hey @js1599,

Sorry about this! I’ve pinged our iOS gurus and we’re investigating what could be causing this. We’ve gotten a couple other reports today of the same problem. What SDK is your project running?

Adam

1 Like
3

Hey Adam,

No worries, I just didn’t know if i shouldn’t of checked the box to use APNS or not, but I’m guessing I did do everything right, correct? I’m using SDK 22

4

Could you tell us when you built your standalone app? A specific date / time would be helpful if you know, and it would also be helpful if to know if the notifications were working before in your standalone app and when they stopped working.

There are three things that come to mind that could have changed:

  1. Code in the Expo client for sending the device token
  2. Code that builds the standalone apps and sets up the provisioning profiles and push certificates
  3. Code that delivers the push notifications to Apple

If you don’t mind, could you also add me to your TestFlight testers (you can DM me) or point me to your App Store app?

5

Thanks for the great service guys.

I built the app around 7pm on Thursday night, and pushed up the store about 2 hours ago. Yes, the notifications were working as of yesterday at around 3pm CST via the expo client as well. I can see the push notifications keys come through to my DB as well after login on my iPhone so I know they’re bring generated, but nothing happens as a result. As of now, it does still work for android.

I will contact my client and ask permission for your info to the Test flight instance. Please DM me your info.

6

Thanks for the detailed info. Just to confirm, is it correct to say that you never were able to send push notifications with the standalone app IPA (not the Expo client)?

7

Correct. It was only possible with the Android standalone but not iOS

8

We’ve deployed an update to the iOS standalone app builders that fixes this issue.

This incident affected only IPAs built with exp build:ios between 2018-01-22 4:30pm to 2018-01-27 10:05pm (Pacific time). This incident did not affect any previously built IPAs, including IPAs that developers may have published to the App Store.

New standalone apps whose builds started after 2018-01-27 at 10:05pm Pacific time will include the new code that correctly registers for push notifications. Developers who have created builds affected by this incident will need to create new IPAs.

You can get a new standalone app IPA by running exp build:ios. Make sure to bump your IPA’s version number so that you can submit the new build to TestFlight (ios → buildNumber in app.json might help: https://docs.expo.io/versions/latest/guides/configuration.html#buildnumber).

9

Can confirm, the issue is now resolved in my app after I followed the above steps. Thanks for the help guys

1 Like
10

I’m still experiencing this issue. The push notification token generated by my standalone iOS app doesn’t work, but the one generated within the Expo app does work. I rebuilt my iOS app and resubmitted it to the app store today per the suggestion above. I updated to the latest version of exp just to be sure as well (although I think the builds run server-side so likely makes no difference).

Here’s the error I’m receiving back from the API:

{
    "data": [
        {
            "status": "error",
            "message": "There was an unexpected error delivering the notification."
        }
    ]
}

The token is definitely being generated in the standalone app, it’s just returning an error when I try to use it. Any ideas? Is there something else I should try?

11

@stevenpal I believe the error you’re seeing is likely unrelated. I’ll follow up with you separately.

12

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