when using xcode 8 doing the push notification setting, unlike xcode 7, xcode 8 need developer turn on push notifications capabilities
My problem was my pusher client was out of date and would only push successfully to debug tokens. Other issue which I am still working on a fix for is that I could only export the app via gym with legacy-api enabled, this was not setting the apns-environment to be 'production' and leaving it as 'development' in the 'embedded-mobile.provision' file. I have however been able to successfully deploy the app via the xcode organiser to work with apns(prod) now.