Expo push notification errors, and what to do about each

Expo’s push service answers in two stages. The ticket comes back at once and says whether Expo accepted the message. The receipt, fetched later with the ticket’s id, says what Apple or Google did with it. Errors can appear in either, and a whole request can also fail. Here is every code Expo documents, and what to do about each.

Request errors (the whole call failed)

These come back in the response’s top-level errors array.

Code	Cause	Fix
PUSH_TOO_MANY_NOTIFICATIONS	More than 100 messages in one request	Send in batches of 100 or fewer
TOO_MANY_REQUESTS	Over 600 notifications a second for the project	Throttle; the Node SDK does this
PUSH_TOO_MANY_EXPERIENCE_IDS	Tokens from more than one Expo project in one request	Group tokens by project; details lists which belong where
PUSH_TOO_MANY_RECEIPTS	More than 1,000 ids in one receipts request	Ask for 1,000 or fewer at a time
UNAUTHORIZED	Push security is on and no valid access token was sent	Send Authorization: Bearer <token>, or accessToken in expo-server-sdk 3.6.0 and later

Ticket errors

A ticket with "status": "error" failed before leaving Expo.

details.error	Meaning	Fix
DeviceNotRegistered	The device can no longer get pushes	Delete the token

Receipt errors

Fetch receipts with the ticket ids:

const res = await fetch("https://exp.host/--/api/v2/push/getReceipts", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: { "content-type": "application/json" },
  body: JSON.stringify({ ids: ticketIds }),
});
const { data } = await res.json();
for (const [id, r] of Object.entries(data)) {
  if (r.status === "error") console.log(id, r.details?.error, r.message);
}

details.error	Meaning	Fix
DeviceNotRegistered	Apple or Google says the device is unregistered: app uninstalled, notifications revoked	Delete the token until the app registers again
MessageTooBig	The payload is over 4,096 bytes	Send less: an id, then fetch the rest in the app
MessageRateExceeded	Too many messages to one device in a short time	Back off exponentially and send more slowly to that device
MismatchSenderId	The FCM credentials and the google-services.json sender id are from different Firebase projects	Use one Firebase project for both
InvalidCredentials	Push credentials for your standalone app are invalid or revoked	Android: upload the FCM V1 service account key again. iOS: eas credentials; rebuild if the message mentions InvalidProviderToken

Receipts are kept 24 hours. Expo suggests checking them about 15 minutes after sending; a receipt still missing then points to a problem on Expo’s side.

A sender that handles all of it

With the official Node SDK, chunking, throttling and receipts look like this:

import { Expo } from "expo-server-sdk";
const expo = new Expo({ accessToken: process.env.EXPO_ACCESS_TOKEN });

const messages = tokens.filter(Expo.isExpoPushToken).map((to) => ({ to, title, body, data }));
const tickets = [];
for (const chunk of expo.chunkPushNotifications(messages)) tickets.push(...(await expo.sendPushNotificationsAsync(chunk)));

const dead = [];
tickets.forEach((t, i) => { if (t.status === "error" && t.details?.error === "DeviceNotRegistered") dead.push(messages[i].to); });

// 15 minutes later, from a job:
const ids = tickets.filter((t) => t.status === "ok").map((t) => t.id);
for (const chunk of expo.chunkPushNotificationReceiptIds(ids)) {
  const receipts = await expo.getPushNotificationReceiptsAsync(chunk);
  // handle DeviceNotRegistered, MessageTooBig, InvalidCredentials as in the table
}

Keep the token with each ticket id when you store them, so a receipt error can point back to the token to delete.

When there is no error at all

Ticket ok, receipt ok, nothing on the phone: Apple or Google accepted it and the device did not show it. On Android that is usually the notification permission on Android 13 and later, a missing channel, or a phone maker’s battery saver. See Expo push notifications not working, the Android 13 notification permission and push on Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo.

Sending without Expo’s service

Expo’s service is free and works well for Expo apps. If you want one sender for Expo, bare React Native, Flutter, native apps and the web, SignOps Push takes your FCM and APNs credentials directly, answers a push to one user with how many of their devices it reached and how many failed, with no receipts to fetch, and removes dead tokens itself. Setup: push in React Native, Expo and Flutter.

Sources: Expo: Send notifications with the Expo Push Service, expo-server-sdk-node.