PUSH notifications are an almost inseparable part of modern mobile applications. Expo ecosystem provides us a straightforward mechanism to send that message directly to our clients, just by requesting an API endpoint. Besides that, they prepared a simple tool: Push notifications tool, by which we can send to particular device PUSH notification with some custom data.

This handy tool is also a bit frustrating in use. Especially, when we have a lot of JSON data in data field, and then we refresh the page by accident. Aside from the fact that we need another window to be opened for sending such test messages.

Some time ago, I prepared a small extension for all Expo and VS Code users. We can use our IDE to send a request to Expo PUSH broadcaster without any other tools. The main feature of it is to save our PUSH payload in a JSON file inside our project. We can easily edit or extend this file to new messages.

Let’s check Expo Toolkit: PUSH in action. I hope you’ll enjoy it!