expo: EXPO notifications is not reliable

Hi, I love EXPO and thanks a lot for it, but in my experience notifications is not reliable and not that good for escalation.

Our code broke
It looks like there was an error we need to look at. Sorry about the inconvenience.

EXPO connection error: Server error: `POST https://exp.host/--/api/v2/push/send` resulted in a `504 Gateway Time-out` response:
<html>
<head><title>504 Gateway Time-out</title></head>
<body>
<center><h1>504 Gateway Time-out</h1></center>
<hr><c (truncated...)

This is a recurring problem, but AFAIK I cannot use firebase for notification with iOS right? I can only use it for android, is that right?

Is there any alternative?

Thanks!!

dhcmega

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 5 years ago
Comments: 24 (9 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

This 504 Gateway Time-out issue is still happening from time to time in 2022 without any proper error message indicating the actual problem.

+14

iainheng on Jul 18, 2022

At some point as Expo continues to scale, it’s a lot to ask of them to continue offering a high-volume service for free. Maybe expo should offer a paid tier for its notification server that has higher SLAs, in addition to a free tier.

kevgrig on Nov 24, 2021

Also, the status page shows: https://status.expo.io/ Push Notifications Broker Operational

but the web page and API gives: 504 Gateway Time-out

dhcmega on Dec 11, 2019

If someone wants to start a little business, you can build a large, reliable notification service that is based on a subscription fee, then add a comment here and I think a lot of people will buy it. If it really takes off, then you can sell it to Expo 😃

kevgrig on Oct 5, 2022

FYI, there is also an option of running your own notification servers: https://docs.expo.dev/push-notifications/sending-notifications-custom/

kevgrig on Nov 24, 2021

we recommend retrying on failure: https://docs.expo.dev/push-notifications/sending-notifications/#retry-on-failure

brentvatne on Oct 28, 2021

Well there is OneSignal, Twilio, etc. But I’m hoping “EAS Notify” fits your description and is running soon.

EAS Notify, an upcoming iteration of Expo’s push notification service, will be a part of EAS’s pricing plans.

Codelica on Oct 5, 2022

At some point as Expo continues to scale, it’s a lot to ask of them to continue offering a high-volume service for free. Maybe expo should offer a paid tier for its notification server that has higher SLAs, in addition to a free tier.

I agree and I would gladly pay for such a service: debugging these errors already cost me probably more than what the subscription would cost. The free tier could be limited in number of notification sent, but in my opinion shouldn’t be so unreliable and place the burden of exponential backoff on clients by design: this kind of defeats the expo mission of streamlining app development. The same reasoning applies to the implementation of my own notification server (thanks for the hint, though).

amagnolo on Nov 25, 2021

Also been seeing an increase in this error – around 10 in the last week.

rrufus on Oct 18, 2021

Hi @dhcmega, sorry about the instability this morning! We’ve updated the status page since then, with an incident for Dec 11, 2019, and are currently looking into increasing reliability.

In the meantime, you’re correct that you can’t use Firebase for iOS notifications yet

cruzach on Dec 11, 2019