Rob117
commented
6 years ago As an addendum, I want people to know about the other alternatives out there. Google the below to find their repositories.
Wix has push notification services, but if you're using react-native navigation it might be difficult to integrate as of this writing. Or if you're looking for deep android customization, the documentation seems confusing.
Expo has build in push notifications. If you are using expo (NOT ExpoKit, as you lose push notifications that way), they manage everything for you. Downsides - if Expo decides one day to stop maintaining their cloud / making push notifications free, and you already released your app, you're going to scramble to get something else in place.
OneSignal - the goto push service. Completely free for all use cases, this push service is apparently very, very easy to use - popular SDKs and integrations make sending notifications a breeze. This also seems to me the most popular. MASSIVE CAVEAT - the freedom comes at the cost of them selling pretty much all the data your app uses to any company interested in it. Put another way - if you would be uncomfortable with anyone (competitor, researcher) having data on your users, or if you have a level of privacy that forbids you from sending third parties user-specific information, you either pay money (starting at $100 for 100k users), or use something else. Data Collected
Firebase FCM - use firebase to manage your push notifications. No real idea how this works, to be perfectly honest with you. I would absolutely love feedback on this by someone more knowledgable, but it seems like you use cloud functions on their serverless backend to send messages? I do wonder how you would integrate this with your own service - i.e. send a notification to everyone who lives in New York City - without also storing that data on their service. Again, if anyone knows, please give feedback.
AWS SNS + native setup - good for broad targeting campaigns, cheap, great security. Absolute monster to get setup unless you are familiar with AWS services, but doesn't have any external dependencies.
AWS Pinpoint/AWS Amplify - New solution, still researching. Pinpoint Amplify
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If you check the issues, you'll notice that react-native link only works for android, and will create a native module cannot be null error.
These issues have been open #603, #501, #428, #541 for a long time, once since 2016.
Additionally, key parts of both the example code (
var PushNotification = require('react-native-push-notification');), and the Readme are dangerously out of date and have been for months - see #617@zo0r I'm not knocking all the work that you put into this, you've done a fantastic job and are the go-to solution for pushing notifications right now.
Which is precisely what worries me. Looking at how long some of the repeat issues have existed for and the lack of maintenance (as of writing, 48 open pull requests and 333 open issues), maybe consider either marking the project as abandoned and redirecting people to https://github.com/invertase/react-native-firebase (which certainly has its own issues) or adding maintainers if the project is proving to cumbersome to maintain.