Notifications

A LawFive server can tell people’s phones about a new weather risk to a match in the next 3 days. Each person turns this on in the app, and it’s off until they do. It’s on Android for now. The iPhone will follow.

Match reminders are separate. The phone schedules those itself, so they work on any server and don’t use any of this.

Why there’s a relay

Only an app’s publisher can send notifications to its store builds, because that takes keys tied to the app. A self-hosted server can’t hold them, so it sends through a small relay the project runs at push.lawfive.app. There’s nothing to set up or sign up for.

Your server → LawFive's relay → Firebase → the LawFive app → back to your server for the details

What the relay sees

It sees	It doesn’t see
Your phones’ Firebase tokens, sealed so only the relay can read them	Names, teams or accounts
Your server’s address	Venues, kickoff times or forecasts
The kind of notification, and a random ID for the match	What the notification will say
The address your server sends from	Anything else in your database

The relay stores no copy of the tokens. It keeps a scrambled form of each one and your server’s address, to count the day’s notifications, and clears them the next day.

The server sends only a fixed kind of event and an ID, so no server can put its own words on anyone’s phone. The app asks its own server what’s going on and writes the notification itself.

Firebase is Google’s service, so Google sees each phone’s token and that a notification was sent to it. If that doesn’t suit you, turn this off.

Limits

Limit	Each day	Each minute
Per phone	25	5
Per server	250	120

Days reset at midnight UTC, and only notifications that reached Firebase count. If a server reaches a limit, it stops sending until then and says so in its logs:

Over the push relay's server limit; no notifications until 2026-11-08T00:00:00.000Z

These limits are comfortable for a server with a few referees. If yours needs more, ask the project. A server that misuses the relay can be blocked.

Turning it off

.env

PUSH_RELAY_URL=off

Then restart with docker compose up -d. The server stops offering notifications, and the setting goes away in the apps.

Using another relay

PUSH_RELAY_URL can point at a relay of your own, but it only works with apps built to match. A relay holds the Firebase keys for one set of apps, so you’d need your own Firebase project and your own builds of the apps. See the push relay.

If notifications don’t arrive

See Troubleshooting.