Rich Notifications

Native Notify's send helpers pass the modern Expo message fields through to every send path — mass, single subscriber, group, and followers. The same fields are accepted directly by the REST endpoints, and the dashboard and MCP server send them too.

These helpers ship in the next native-notify release — install native-notify@latest to get them (see Upgrading to v5).

Send helpers

All four take the same options object, resolve with the server's response, and throw when the server rejects the send. sendIndieGroupNotification also throws when subIDs is not a non-empty array — an empty audience would otherwise be a silent no-op.

Quick start

import { sendMassNotification, sendIndieNotification } from 'native-notify';

// Every registered device (mass):
await sendMassNotification('Service update', 'We are back online.', {
  pushData: { url: '/status' },
  subtitle: 'All systems normal',
  channelId: 'alerts',          // Android channel — create it first (below)
  interruptionLevel: 'active',  // iOS
  sound: 'chime.wav',
});

// One subscriber (indie):
await sendIndieNotification(userId, 'Your order', 'It shipped!', {
  pushData: { url: '/orders/' + orderId },
  badge: 1,
  categoryId: 'ORDER_UPDATE',
});

// A custom audience, or the followers of a follow-master:
await sendIndieGroupNotification(subIds, 'Group news', 'Hello all', { channelId: 'news' });
await sendNotificationToFollowers(masterSubId, 'New post', 'Read it', { mutableContent: true });

Options

Every helper accepts the same options object:

Worth knowing:

• Only the options you pass are sent. Unset fields keep the server's defaults, and sound: false, badge: 0 and contentAvailable: false are real values, not omissions.
• The server validates them up front. An invalid value (an unknown interruptionLevel, a non-boolean mutableContent, …) fails the request with a 400 instead of being rejected per recipient by Expo.
• Raw REST calls accept one more field: expiration (a unix timestamp) as an alternative to ttl. The SDK helpers expose ttl.
• Open analytics work with these sends. Mass and single-indie sends carry the hidden notification id that Sessions & Push Opens reports on — enable it with analytics: { opens: true }.

Android notification channels: setAndroidNotificationChannel

A channelId in your send has to match a channel the app has created on the device. setAndroidNotificationChannel(channelId, options) is a thin wrapper over expo-notifications' setNotificationChannelAsync():

import * as Notifications from 'expo-notifications';
import { setAndroidNotificationChannel } from 'native-notify';

await setAndroidNotificationChannel('alerts', {
  name: 'Alerts',
  importance: Notifications.AndroidImportance.HIGH,
  sound: 'chime.wav',
  vibrationPattern: [0, 250, 250, 250],
});

// Then send to it:
await sendMassNotification('Heads up', 'The service is back', { channelId: 'alerts' });

Create the channel before sending a push with a matching channelId, so the notification routes to it. The channel's name, sound, importance, and vibration are user-visible in Android's per-app notification settings.

Options — only the keys you set are used:

setAndroidNotificationChannel() resolves true on Android; it resolves false on iOS/web (Android channels don't exist there) or when the call fails — it never throws, so callers keep their default channel.