Meteor App: Push notifications stopped working for Android 8+ when updating TargetSDK to 26

Question

Context:

• Meteor 1.8.0.1
• Cordova 6.4.0 (included with Meteor)
• phonegap-plugin-push 1.11.1 (last version which supports GCM)
• Push notifications via Amazon SNS -> GCM

Problem:

Recently we had to update our targetSdkVersion from 25 to 26, because of new restrictions of the Google Play Store. Since we did that, our push notifications stopped working for devices with Android 8 and above.

Registering the device works fine, but it just won't receive any notifications.

Tested with following devices:

• Samsung Galaxy S9+ Android 8 -> does not work
• Sony Xperia XZ Premium Android 9 -> does not work
• Google Nexus 7 (2013) Android 6.0.1 -> works fine

Notes:

I tried to use a newer version of phonegap-plugin-push (2.1.3 the last one which supports Cordova 6.4.0) with a firebase test project, from which I got the google-service.json, so I can use fcm but that even caused the app to crash.

Answer 1

Check out this post. Starting from Android 8 all notifications have to have notification channel.