Can I send push notifications without storing device tokens myself?

Yes — but only in certain architectures. In the usual push-notification setup, you do need some way to target devices, and that typically means storing device tokens (or an equivalent identifier) on your side.

When you usually need to store tokens

For APNs (iOS) and FCM (Android/web), your app gets a device token / registration token from the push provider. To send a notification later, your server generally needs to keep that token so it can address the device.

Ways to avoid storing tokens yourself

You can avoid managing tokens directly if you use a service that does it for you, for example:

• OneSignal
• Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) with topics / user groups
• AWS Pinpoint
• Braze / Airship / Mixpanel / Customer.io, etc.

In those cases:

• your app still gets a token,
• but the vendor SDK/backend stores and manages it,
• and you send notifications by targeting a user ID, tag, segment, or topic instead of raw device tokens.

If you want zero token storage anywhere

That’s generally not possible for standard push notifications, because the push network needs a routing identifier to reach the device. You may be able to avoid storing tokens yourself, but not avoid the concept entirely.

Common alternatives

If you want to avoid tokens on your backend, you can use:

• Topics (broadcast to subscribed devices)
• User mapping through a provider (provider stores tokens)
• Email/SMS/in-app messages instead of push

If you want, I can suggest the best approach for your stack (iOS, Android, web, Flutter, React Native, etc.).