reported from the field on the first real push: it failed with BadDeviceToken
and the server deleted the registration. the build was production-signed and
the row said sandbox — a configuration mismatch, with the device and the app
both perfectly fine.
pruning there destroys the evidence. the phone re-registers on next launch,
the row comes back looking healthy, and the next send fails identically; you
can lose a day to that loop without ever seeing what is actually wrong.
so the one set becomes three. Unregistered/UNREGISTERED/NOT_FOUND prune —
apple and google are saying the app is uninstalled. BadDeviceToken,
DeviceTokenNotForTopic, TopicDisallowed, INVALID_ARGUMENT and
SENDER_ID_MISMATCH are OURS: the row is kept and the log says what to check.
everything else is transient and still counts toward three strikes.
INVALID_ARGUMENT was the sharpest one. it is how fcm reports a malformed
MESSAGE — including a non-string in `data`, which is the mistake this codebase
is most likely to make and already has a test for. deleting on it meant one
bug in the payload builder would wipe every android device from the registry
on a single send, presenting as "android push stopped working" with nothing
left to explain why.
misconfigured is also not counted as a strike. not deleting is not enough on
its own — a persistent mismatch would reach three failures and delete the row
anyway, which is the same bug with a slower fuse.
the apns log now names the mismatch rather than the reason code, since the
code alone sends people to look at the device: it prints the row's environment
and topic and says to check the SHIPPED artefact rather than the intermediate
build, which is exactly where this one hid.