I dream about… tokens??
🚀 Road to 1,000,000 #Votap users — Day 61 | Current: 1295
I dream about… tokens??
Push notifications in Votap have been pretty simple so far. If you follow a politician or based on your country → we send topic-based notifications (basically broadcast to a group). Easy.
But now I’m building notifications for comment replies…
Which means:
they have to be user-specific.
And suddenly everything gets… interesting.
Tokens:
→ rotate all the time
→ are tied to a device, not a user (so login/logout matters)
→ expire if not used
→ and if you don’t clean them up → they hurt your delivery performance
So yeah… what sounded like “just send a notification” turned into a whole system 😅
Didn’t expect this part to be this deep, but it’s actually pretty fun once you get into it.
Download Votap from the App Store if you want to follow along.
More tomorrow.
Replies
Wait until you start dealing with multiple devices per user 😅 That’s where it gets even more fun. Token cleanup is super important though, good that you're thinking about it early.
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Cleaning up tokens is on of those small details that can quietly break things if ignored. Good that you are thinking about it early.
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@anil_yadav38 Yeah Anil true. I wish Firebase had a simpler solution to this, it seems like this should be handled by them. But hey I'll keep at it!
Haha this is so real — what seems like just send a notification turns into a full distributed systems problem!
We ran into similar chaos building Hello Aria — our AI productivity assistant that manages your day via WhatsApp/Telegram/iOS. WhatsApp delivery receipts + FCM tokens on iOS + Telegram update channels — keeping them all in sync and cleaned up is genuinely non-trivial.
The token expiry issue especially — we had an early phase where stale tokens were silently failing and delivery rates were dropping for no obvious reason. Fixed it by adding token validation on every send and aggressive cleanup of 410/invalid responses.
Good luck with the Votap comment notifications! The moment user-specific replies land reliably, the engagement jump will be very real.
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