Steve Moretz: just making sure I understand, you're using the Firebase Admin SDKs to send the notification instead of the Expo Push API like what's documented here. https://rnfirebase.io/messaging/usage#data-only-messages

And on the frontend, you're using react-native messaging instead of expo-notifications package?

Chen W: That is correct, but remember you can use any backend sdk depending on your backend language, so you don't exactly need to do what is provided in the link you provided, but the concept is the same you don't pass notification and only data and it's done! For the front-end also you are correct in the same page you'll find some events for receiving events on background : https://rnfirebase.io/messaging/usage#background--quit-state-messages

and foreground:

And these two are all you need beside setting up, maybe you won't even need the background ones either.

sendylo app: May I ask how would you track your uninstall via this?

Steve Moretz: when the user uninstall your app, silent push notifications will fail with a specific message. Based on that, you know it’s uninstalled.

The idea is to send those silent messages regularly to check. Maybe once a day or so. Thats the only way I found to track uninstalls

sendylo app: wow thank you that's a very great idea! Well I didn't know about this, and implemented a mechanism for knowing if the user has uninstalled the app, it's not as good of course but you could just somehow manage to save the last time a user uses your app everyday on your server and if you have users who are inactive in a long time consider them uninstalled, not great and doesn't work instantly (for each user that interval needs to be passed) but it works, better than nothing...

Steve Moretz: yeah. That’s why these silent notifications are needed. I have already searched all over the web on how to get app uninstalls on expo 😥. If someone has another solution, please help

Steve Moretz: did you succeed to make silent notifications work with the content-available flag on expo?

kesylo: as I mentioned earlier, the document is unclear and it is very hard to make it work right now so I gave it up and switched to websockets for now, but your use case is different. If you really need it you have to go a different route check out Micheal Wood's answer below.

Steve Moretz: ok. Can you explain how you used the webdsockets to detect app uninstalls ?

kesylo: Unfortunately as I mentioned my use case is different, you can't use websocket to monitor uninstalls, websocket only works on the foreground, you need some kind of pushing one way would be to install fcm and use that, that has support for background notifications but we had to eject a long time ago right now this might be possible with EAS without ejecting, however I'm not sure how.

Wodin:

Why not add this feature to the new expo-notification?

Steve Moretz: I am just an Expo user. I don't work for them :)

Wodin: Sorry I always though you did :)

Wodin: They should pay you for your work. 🤔

Lars Moelleken: 😂

Steve Moretz: How?

Luca Palomba:someone in discord of expo was once talking about it, there are three keys you set in the new expo-notification config one of them apparently does something like this, I have not tested it myself however and don't remember which one of the three.

Steve Moretz: Really? I need to find it!

Luca Palomba:

Here :

You can find this :

Notifications.setNotificationHandler({

handleNotification: async () => ({

shouldShowAlert: true,

shouldPlaySound: false,

shouldSetBadge: false,

}),

});

It shall be one of these I guess this one "shouldShowAlert" just set it to true or false and see if that does the trick, if it does please let us know too, if it doesn't please try changing the other two.

Again I have not tested it myself just heard about it on the discord channel.

I remember another way I did it that could remove the notification and keep it silent when the app is foregrounded (by listening and cancelling the notification), but had no way to disable it when it is backgrounded, but this that I mentioned above probably solves the problem for backgrounded mode as well.

Steve Moretz: Yes i've just implemented this method on my app and as you say works only when foreground. So in background notifications continues to be showed and this, obiviously is not wha a silent notifcations should do.

Luca Palomba: Did you put shouldShowAlert to false? as I mentioned I used another method to get rid of the frontend notifications,I thought shouldShowAlert : false is supposed to fix the background as well, isn't it?

Steve Moretz: Confirm, isn't. I admit I didn't try a fresh install but i don't know if can change something or not.