Notifee -> Expo Notifications Gap Analysis, what is Expo Notifications missing that Notifee does?

[mikehardy]

The goal here is to see if there are any functionality gaps between the packages that would completely block any Notifee users from migrating to Expo Notifications if desired.

Please feel free to post up anything you noticed

[sojharo]

Local notifications when we schedule them through Notifee works perfectly on physical android device but do not work on Expo notifications library. This is the one reason I was waiting for this library to be supported more.

[mikehardy]

@sojharo - interesting, is there an upstream issue in the expo notifications library, ideally with a reproducer / or exact steps to reproduce?

[jared-94]

There is no Notification Service Extension for iOS in expo lib (up to my knowledge)

[mikehardy]

@jared-94 that's a big deal - without that it is impossible to alter appearance of any notification on iOS while app is in background. Good to know

[qroac]

expo-notifications does not support images for notifications using the attachments-property.
This is a long going discussion. People want it, expo doesn't support it. That is why I chose notifee some years ago.

expo/expo#27980

[mikehardy]

@qroac that may be (based on a quick read of that link) another class of the more generic "expo-notifications does not have a Notification Service Extension".

In general for this issue I will add that the goal of this is to determine the gaps with the idea that the expo-notifications library will need PRs to close the gaps

Just like you I want all my software for free (no money, no effort required) but that's not realistic. There will likely need to be effort in form of work on expo-notifications

[Thanaen]

For me, the biggest blocker is the support for “Quick Actions.”
Officially, expo-notifications supports this via the addNotificationResponseReceivedListener method, but in practice, it quite often happened that a Quick Action didn’t trigger this method — unlike Notifee, which is very reliable in that regard.

[janwiebe-jump]

expo-notifications does not support progress indicators as Notifee does on Android.

[Martinocom-Switcho]

expo-notifications does not work well if OneSignal is used. I wanted to schedule some Provisional Notifications, but all the "click" events are swallowed (probably by OneSignal that discards them).

Notifee works well.

Related issues:

• [Bug]: Expo notification listeners stop working when used alongside OneSignal OneSignal/react-native-onesignal#1742
• [question]: Run OneSignal in parallel with expo-notifications OneSignal/onesignal-expo-plugin#177

[mikehardy]

That looks pretty gnarly @Martinocom-Switcho - it does amuse me that everyone logs issues, but there are no related pull requests to fix the issue (that is, to make it so expo-notifications handles the "delegate already exists" case and chains them).

The issue to pull request ratio shouldn't be a divide-by-zero case, or as you see with those issues - nothing happens...

[ps-george]

Local notifications when we schedule them through Notifee works perfectly on physical android device but do not work on Expo notifications library. This is the one reason I was waiting for this library to be supported more.

I've never managed to get local notifications to work with expo-notificaitons. Gave Notifee a shot (despite reading that you no longer plan to maintain it), and first try it worked perfectly. Don't see an open issue though on the Expo repo... I feel like their huge monorepo discourages them - you just see so many issues and get disheartened. I'll need to take the time for a small repro to create one.

[mikehardy]

It can be disheartening just because of sheer volume of issues - it's a firehose - however in my experience their software is normally good. They effectively "won" the category of "react-native framework" that didn't even exist before because the software is useful and works.

Well, perhaps with some gaps on notifications but then again they may not have had so many users precisely because notifee exists! 😆 I don't view it as a competition though. If we all join forces and help with defining the features a good notifications library should have, and make repros for why expo-notifications isn't there yet, help harvest code and move it over there, expo-notifications seems like it could shape up

[liamjones]

Still trying to find some time to help with gap analysis, things are manic here atm.

Mike, is it worth pinning this issue to sit alongside the "Is this library still maintained" one? It might get more eyes on it and more input.

[sojharo]

@sojharo - interesting, is there an upstream issue in the expo notifications library, ideally with a reproducer / or exact steps to reproduce?

@mikehardy I am not sure what the issue is. In Notifee, it just works out of the box. However, for expo-notifications, there are some discussions on this issue (with some resolution), but it still doesn't work.

expo/expo#10700

You can see my last comment there.

Also, as Notifee is not updated with latest react native, I had to add following line in my build.gradle to make it work.

maven { url "$rootDir/../node_modules/@notifee/react-native/android/libs" }

I had to upgrade to latest react native and expo because of recent android play store requirement to support page size.