Sometimes it’s great to pick up your phone, see exactly what you want to see, and then put it away without unlocking it or risking it being sucked in. This is the idea behind live activities. Live Activities is an underutilized iOS feature that gives apps real-time visibility. Lock screen and dynamic island updates.
If you’ve ever listened to music, set a time, or hailed an Uber, you’ve probably seen live activity. It’s just a way to get passive updates on your lock screen about what’s going on. Live activity is different from the lock screen widget that appears when you tap half of the screen. These are more like notifications than widgets and usually contain some real-time information.
Live Activity provides a great way to passively track all kinds of information, from sports scores to tides. Here are some of the best apps I’ve found that allow you to take advantage of this feature.
Check flight times from your airline or Flighty
The last thing you want when driving through an airport is constantly unlocking your phone to check information like departure times and gate numbers.
Some airlines, including United in the US, offer live activity features within their apps. However, if your airline doesn’t, you’re not out of luck. The app Flighty provides live activity that captures such information in real time. Even better, if you give the app access to your calendar, it will automatically pick up the flights in your schedule. This means you don’t even need to open the app to see your live activity on your lock screen. Everything is done automatically. No more walking or scrolling looking for flight data. The main drawback is that it’s not free. Flightly subscriptions start at $48 a year, which is expensive, but he gets two free flights to try everything out before committing.
Get sports scores from Apple TV or Sports Alerts
Who do you think is a Red Wings fan?
Credit: Justin Potts
You may be actively watching the match, or you may be doing something else while the match is being played. Live activities are perfect for these situations. You can turn to your smartphone every once in a while to check your score or other important stats and get back to what you’re doing. Apple offers some live sports activities in the Apple TV app (I don’t know why you can’t access live activities from the new Apple Sports app, I hope so). Apple TV only offers live activities for the NBA, MLB, MLS and some European sports leagues.
But if you need soccer or hockey scores, or just want all your scores in one place, check out Sports Alerts. This free app offers scores for far more leagues (including women’s leagues) than Apple Sports, and you can get live activity for any game that offers scores. The only downside to this and the Apple TV service is that there’s no way to automatically launch activities when a team you follow plays a game. You must access the app and start the activity manually.
Get live tide information with Tide Charts
It’s definitely not a miscommunication.
Credit: Justin Potts
Whether you live near the ocean or just visit the ocean occasionally, it’s important to know how the tides change. The application “Tide Charts” will tell you exactly that, providing you with an easy way to check the tides without opening your phone completely. Unfortunately, Live Activities are not currently available in the free version of the app. The full version costs $30 per year, but it’s probably only worth it if you rely on tracking your work trends.
Get election results from Apple News
Credit: Justin Potts
It’s an election year. For some people, the healthiest option is to wait until the next day to find out who won (if they’re lucky). If you can’t do that yourself, but don’t want to endlessly hit “refresh” on the results page, consider using Live Activity via Apple News. When elections are underway, including upcoming primaries, you can turn on live updates to see results on your lock screen as they arrive. I tried this during the South Carolina primary and it worked.
How to enable Live Activity on iPhone
If you want to start using Live Activities on your iPhone, you’ll first need to make sure Live Activities is turned on. Here’s how (if you’re using iOS 16.1 or later):
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Open the Settings app
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Scroll down to “Face ID & Passcode”
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[ロック時にアクセスを許可する]Scroll down until you see the subsection,[ライブ アクティビティ]Make sure the slider next to is green.
