Push Notifications in 2026: Expo, APNs and FCM Basics

Push notifications fail silently. The user taps allow, your server sends, and nothing arrives, with no error on screen to tell you why. Almost every one of those failures comes down to tokens, and that's what this video is really about: how the whole flow works so you can debug it with confidence.

What's inside

• How permission requests and push tokens actually work
• Why tokens change and why you should fetch a fresh one on every launch
• What Expo's receipt IDs really mean (queued is not delivered)
• Sending through Expo vs directly to APNs and FCM
• Testing with Quick Push and the open source X1 Notifications app
• Catching invalid tokens and cleaning them out of your database
• The credentials iOS needs: team ID, bundle ID, and a P8 key

Resources

CourseReact Native course

Go deeper in the Push Notifications section: 100 minutes on Expo, OneSignal, and rich media.