Expo Push Notifications

# Fix list: Expo Push Notifications

From Anchor Terminal's listing at https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/expo-push-notifications, the October 2026 research run, assessed 9 October 2026. Grade C, 58.8 out of 100.

This is everything the published grade says the listing lacks, the biggest possible gain to the total first. It comes from the reason given for each score, the checklist each category was scored against (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist), the provenance checks, the deductions, what we couldn't check and what the review panel asked for. A fix counts at the next check, once it's public.

For a coding agent working on Expo Push Notifications: work through the items below in the product, its docs and its public pages. Each category gives the reason for its score, with the points each checklist item earned, and the checklist itself, so the gap is the items that earned less than their points. Change the product, not the wording, and keep a note of what you changed and where it's published.

## 1. Security & auth, 48 out of 100, up to 9.1 more on the total

Why it scored 48: By default the API takes no credential, and the docs say a leaked push token lets another party send to that device. An owner can require a Bearer access token, either a personal token that acts on every account the person can reach or a robot user's token limited by role, and both can be revoked (12 of 30). Robot users take a role, but no send-only permission or confirmation step was found (6 of 20). Tickets and receipts return only status and error fields, no third-party content (10). Audit logs of administrative actions are for Enterprise subscribers, and there is no per-send log beyond receipts kept 24 hours (5 of 15). A security.txt with a disclosure address and no Expires field, bounties described as usually reserved for flaws as severe as remote code execution, and SOC 2 Type 2 for the Security criterion with the report on request (15 of 20).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-security):

- 0 to 30, the credential model. 30 for OAuth 2.1 with scopes, or scoped and revocable keys with rotation. 20 for plain revocable API keys. 10 for one all-powerful key. 10 off when a secret can travel in a URL query string as a documented option.
- 0 to 20, read-only or least-privilege modes, and confirmation or approval for destructive actions.
- 0 to 15, prompt-injection posture where the tool returns untrusted content (documented mitigations or guidance). A tool that returns no untrusted content gets 10.
- 0 to 15, audit logs or per-call visibility for the operator.
- 0 to 20, a security programme. security.txt or a disclosure policy, a bug bounty, SOC 2 or ISO 27001, advisories handled in public.

Models are read for retention, whether API data trains models (and whether that's off by default), zero-retention options and certifications. Frameworks for telemetry defaults, approval hooks, guardrails and sandboxing.

## 2. Payments & pricing, 40 out of 100, up to 7.5 more on the total

Why it scored 40: No x402, MPP or L402 (0). The push FAQ says sending costs nothing, and the pricing page is public (20). The service is free and the Free plan is $0 a month. Whether signup asks for a card was not stated (15 of 20). The send call needs no key, but a push token exists only after a person has set up an Expo account, a project and APNs and FCM credentials, and the terms bar accounts registered by agents (5 of 20).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-payments):

The published rubric, also on the [x402 page](https://www.anchorterminal.com/x402/).

- 40, a machine payment protocol (x402, MPP or L402) on the tool's own endpoints. 10 to 30 when it covers only some endpoints or only goes through a third party, and the note says which.
- 20, per-call or per-unit pricing published without a login. 10 for public plan-only pricing, 0 for "contact sales" or prices behind a login.
- 20, a free tier or trial that doesn't need a card.
- 20, autonomous onboarding, meaning an agent can get access without a person signing up in a browser (keyless use, x402, a programmatic key API).

Payment platforms and agent wallets rarely charge for their own API over a machine protocol, so the first line has steps for them, and the highest one that applies counts. 40 when x402, MPP or L402 runs on all their own endpoints, 30 when it runs on part of their own API, 25 when their merchants can accept one, 20 for running a facilitator, 15 for paying as a buyer, and 0 when the only protocol is their own. Merchant acceptance sits above a facilitator because the platform's own customers can charge agents through it, while a facilitator settles for sellers who wire up the protocol themselves. The counter-argument (a facilitator does more for the protocol as a whole) has a point. Each note says which step applied.

Open-source software you run yourself is scored on its hosted or paid option if it has one. A free, self-hosted package with nothing to buy gets 20, 20 and 20 for the last three lines, and 0 to 40 for the first only if it ships a payment protocol.

## 3. Reliability, 65 out of 100, up to 7 more on the total

Why it scored 65: Hosted reading. status.expo.dev is a Statuspage site with a Push Notifications Broker component (20). The incident feed reaches back only to 4 August 2026, so 11 July to 3 August went unread. It lists three push incidents, an iOS push partial outage on 4 August lasting 83 minutes, delayed iOS push for an hour on 5 September and an iOS queue backlog on 8 September lasting 4 hours 41 minutes, plus wider API and website incidents on 1 September and 5 October. Read as one major incident (10). Limits are published with numbers, 600 notifications a second per project, 100 messages a request and 1,000 receipt IDs a request (15). The docs tell callers to retry 429 and 5xx with exponential backoff and the Node SDK does so twice on 429. No Retry-After header is documented and there is no idempotency key, while Expo says a notification may be handed on more than once (10 of 15). The docs state the push service has no SLA (0). The API is generally available (10).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-reliability):

Hosted APIs, MCP servers, models and platforms.

- 20, a public status page with component history (Statuspage, Instatus, BetterStack or the vendor's own).
- 0 to 30, the incident record for the last 90 days on that page. 30 for a clean record or trivial incidents only, 20 for minor incidents only, 10 for one major outage (an hour or more of a core API down, or errors across the board), 0 for several. 5 when there's no history we could read, and the note says so.
- 15, rate limits documented with numbers.
- 15, documented 429 or overload handling (Retry-After, backoff guidance), and idempotency keys or safe-retry guidance where writes are involved.
- 10, an SLA published for any paid tier.
- 10, the surface agents use is generally available, not beta or preview.

Local packages, SDKs, frameworks and stdio MCP servers.

- 20, installs from an official package with supported runtimes stated.
- 25, a public CI and test suite, passing on the default branch.
- 0 to 25, open crash or regression issues relative to activity (25 for few and handled, 0 for many, old and unanswered).
- 15, semver discipline and breaking changes called out in a changelog.
- 15, version 1.0 or later, or declared stable.

Protocols are read from their reference implementations, the public facilitators or servers, spec stability and test vectors.

## 4. Schema & documentation, 60 out of 100, up to 6.5 more on the total

Why it scored 60: API reading. No OpenAPI file or other machine-readable description of the push API was found. The Node SDK publishes TypeScript types for messages, tickets and receipts (5 of 25). docs.expo.dev has an `llms.txt` page map and serves every page as Markdown (10). The message table gives each field's platform and its APNs or FCM equivalent, with notes on `ttl`, `priority` and `channelId`, and the page says when to call FCM and APNs directly instead (16 of 20). Fields are typed, with enums for `priority` and `interruptionLevel`, while `data` and the error `details` are free-form objects (10 of 15). curl requests, sample responses, four request error codes and five receipt error codes with fixes (13 of 15). The path carries `v2`, and the docs page shows a modification date of 25 September 2026. No changelog for the push API was found, only the Node SDK's (6 of 15).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-schema):

APIs and MCP servers.

- 25, a machine-readable contract (a public OpenAPI file or similar; for MCP, typed JSON Schema inputs on every tool).
- 10, llms.txt or Markdown docs served for agents.
- 0 to 20, descriptions that say what a tool is for, when to use it and when not to, read from the tool definitions in the source or the API reference.
- 0 to 15, typed inputs with enums, constraints and required fields, and no free-form JSON blobs.
- 0 to 15, examples and documented error responses.
- 15, versioning and a public changelog.

Models are read from the API reference, the OpenAPI file, llms.txt, the structured-output and tool-use docs and the model cards. Frameworks from docs a model can follow, typed interfaces, examples and the API reference.

## 5. Agent ergonomics, 63 out of 100, up to 6 more on the total

Why it scored 63: API reading. Responses are a ticket or receipt per message and nothing else, and one request carries up to 100 messages (22 of 25). Receipts are fetched by ID, up to 1,000 a request, and cleared after 24 hours. There is no call to list sent notifications and no filtering (8 of 20). Request and receipt errors have named codes with a stated fix, and per-message errors come back alongside successes (17 of 20). No idempotency key and no dry run. Retry guidance is written down and Expo says duplicates are possible (6 of 20). Only `to` is required and no credential is needed by default. Expo maintains one SDK, for Node.js, and the other twelve listed are community or Symfony libraries (10 of 15).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-ergonomics):

- 0 to 25, context cost. For MCP, the number and size of the tool definitions (25 for ten or fewer compact tools, 15 for 11 to 30, 5 for more than 30, plus up to 10 back for toolsets, dynamic loading or read-only subsets). For APIs, whether responses can be sized (field selection, limits, summaries).
- 20, pagination, filtering and output-size controls.
- 20, actionable, documented error responses, codes and messages an agent can recover from.
- 20, idempotency or safe retries, and for MCP the `readOnlyHint` and `destructiveHint` annotations.
- 15, sensible defaults, few required parameters, and official SDKs in at least two languages.

Models are read for tool use, structured output, prompt caching, context length, batch and SDKs. Frameworks for how much code and how many defaults a tool-calling agent with MCP needs.

## 6. Transparency & trust, 68 out of 100, up to 2.8 more on the total

Made of editorial 60, provenance 76.

Why it scored 68: Closed service under Expo's terms of service, which cover every Expo service without naming push, with an MIT Node SDK (15 of 30). The FAQ says notification content is held only in memory and queues until handed to Apple or Google, the security page says push tokens are stored and the payload deleted after sending, and the privacy policy lists push tokens among data collected. These agree. No retention period for tokens and no public DPA were found (22 of 30). The docs mark `_contentAvailable` as deprecated with no removal date, and no deprecation policy was found (5 of 20). The sub-processor list, updated 15 September 2026, names each company with its country and lists Apple and Google for sending push, and the docs place the push service on Google Cloud in the United States (18 of 20).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-transparency):

- 0 to 30, source availability and licence clarity. 30 for open source under an OSI licence, 15 for closed with clear terms, 0 for unclear terms.
- 0 to 30, data handling and retention statements that agree with each other (privacy policy, DPA, retention periods, subprocessors).
- 0 to 20, a deprecation policy or notices with dates.
- 0 to 20, telemetry disclosed with an opt-out (local software), or subprocessors and data locations disclosed (hosted).

The other half of Transparency and trust is the provenance score, computed from checked facts (below). The category score is the mean of the two.

Provenance checks not met in full (half of this category, computed from checked facts):

- Domain age: expo.dev, registered 2019-02-22 (7 years) (11 of 15)
- Endpoint on the vendor's domain: exp.host is not on expo.dev (0 of 15)
- Terms of service: read, states 7 of the 7 things a reader expects, and has 2 clauses that cost points (6 of 10)
- Privacy policy: read, states 6 of the 8 things a reader expects (8.5 of 10)

## 7. Maintenance & community, 74 out of 100, up to 2.3 more on the total

Why it scored 74: Read as a closed service with an official SDK. The Node SDK's latest tag is v7.2.0 on 24 August 2026, 46 days before the check (20 of 30). Three releases in the last 90 days, v7.0.0 on 30 July, v7.1.0 on 8 August and v7.2.0 on 24 August (20). The SDK repository shows 2 open issues and pull requests in total, with a dependency update merged on 29 September. We did not read the issue threads or test support (15 of 25). One current official SDK, for Node.js only (10 of 15). The repository runs a test workflow on every push and pull request with Renovate configured. We did not see the run results (9 of 10).

The checklist (https://www.anchorterminal.com/benchmark/#checklist-maintenance):

- 0 to 30, time since the last release, or the last published model or API change for a closed service. 30 within 30 days, 20 within 90, 10 within 180, 0 older.
- 20, at least three releases or dated changelog entries in the last 90 days.
- 0 to 25, responsiveness. Issues and pull requests answered on GitHub (the open issues and how recent the replies are). For closed services, a public changelog and a support or community channel that answers, 0 to 15.
- 15, presence in the official MCP registry under a verified namespace (MCP servers), or current official SDKs (APIs and models).
- 10, package health, current dependencies and CI.

Models are read for deprecation notice periods and model churn rather than release counts.

## What we couldn't check

What we couldn't read counted as absent. Publishing it on a page a plain HTTP fetch can read (not only in a browser) lets the next check count it.

- unchecked: the status record from 11 July to 3 August 2026, which the incident feed no longer lists
- unchecked: the Expo subscription agreement, which expo.dev/robots.txt disallows
- unchecked: the Drata trust centre and any DPA behind it
- Whether signup for the Free plan asks for a card
- Whether 429 responses carry a Retry-After header, which the docs do not say
- Whether the 1 September and 5 October 2026 platform incidents affected push sends
- The docs give 1,000 receipt IDs a request and the Node SDK chunks at 300. Which limit the server enforces was not tested
- Expo's terms bar accounts registered by bots, agents or other automated means, which matters before any probe is run

## Weaknesses

- The send API needs no authentication by default, so anyone holding a push token can send to that device until the owner enables access tokens
- No idempotency key. Expo says a notification may reach Apple or Google more than once, or not at all
- No SLA for the push service, stated in the docs
- Three iOS push incidents on the status page since 4 August 2026, one a partial outage of 83 minutes and one a backlog of 4 hours 41 minutes
- No OpenAPI file or push API changelog was found, and only the Node.js SDK is maintained by Expo
- Expo's terms say accounts registered by bots, agents or other automated means are not permitted. This matters before any probe is run

## What costs an agent a turn today

The notes we give agents before they call it. Each one is a workaround an agent shouldn't need.

- Send an array of up to 100 messages per request, all for one project, and stay under 600 notifications a second
- Keep each ticket `id` and POST them to `/--/api/v2/push/getReceipts` about 15 minutes later. Receipts are cleared after 24 hours
- Stop sending to a token when a ticket or receipt returns `DeviceNotRegistered`
- If the project has enhanced push security on, send `Authorization: Bearer <access token>` or the call fails with `UNAUTHORIZED`
- Retry 429 and 5xx with exponential backoff, and expect an occasional duplicate because there is no idempotency key

## When it's done

Send what changed and where it's published as a dispute (https://www.anchorterminal.com/builders/#disputes, or `POST https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/contact` with `"kind": "dispute"`). Disputes are answered in public, and the listing is checked again by the same checklist. Paying for an audit or a listing claim changes nothing here.