Short answer

For most apps, ship with Expo Push. Switch to FCM (and APNs direct) when you are sending millions of pushes a day or you need advanced targeting Expo does not expose.

I shipped 4 apps in a month with Expo Push. I have also shipped a higher-volume product on raw FCM + APNs. Here is the honest trade.

Expo Push: what you get

• One token format that works for both iOS and Android.
• A single send endpoint: https://exp.host/--/api/v2/push/send.
• Receipt API so expired tokens get cleaned up.
• No APNs cert management. No FCM server key paste.
• Free for reasonable volumes.

Setup time for a first app: under 30 minutes. Real.

FCM direct: what you get

• Topic and condition targeting (subscribe a group of users to a topic, send to all of them).
• Advanced scheduling windows and platform-specific payloads.
• Higher throughput. Google does not throttle you the way Expo does at massive scale.
• Analytics via Firebase.

Setup time for a first app: 2–4 hours, plus the APNs cert setup for iOS.

What actually differs in practice

• Simple use case (send a push to a user): Both work. Expo is faster to ship.
• Broadcast to 100k users: FCM has the edge. Expo can do it but rate-limits more aggressively.
• Per-platform payload: FCM gives you more control. Expo covers the common cases.
• iOS reliability: Identical — both route to APNs in the end. If your iOS pushes are not delivering, the issue is your APNs cert or your opt-in rate, not the layer on top.

Where Expo Push annoys me

• Legacy/critical alerts require direct APNs. Not an Expo limitation — Apple limitation — but you cannot do it via Expo.
• Analytics are thin. You get receipts but not engagement tracking out of the box. I add PostHog events for open/interact.

Where FCM annoys me

• Managing APNs certs (auth key is less painful but still a setup step).
• The native Android setup + google-services.json dance.
• Two SDKs to keep in sync across RN upgrades.

My default

Expo Push for everything up to roughly 100k daily active users. Switch to FCM direct only when I hit a reason — topic targeting, high-volume marketing, critical alerts.

What AI App Factory ships

Expo Push by default, with a clear swap path to FCM. The backend sender is an interface, not a hardcoded call. You swap the implementation without touching the rest of the app.

See pricing