Live activities are about to be Live
Thanks to Luni — where I work as a Software Engineer — I had the opportunity to investigate and play with Live Activities.
This article doesn’t intend to cover it all but may get you started.
Requirements
Although Xcode 14.0 beta SDK was a preview of Activity Kit, the official release of Xcode 14.0 removed it. Xcode 14.1 (or beta) is necessary to start working with Live Activities, running on iOS 16.1 which will be released in the next few days.
What’s a live activity ?
TLDR; a live activity is a widget that appears on the lockscreen, is started by the app, can be updated (or stopped) by the app or via Apple Push Notification Service. It also appears in the Dynamic Island when your app isn’t in foreground.
If you watched the entire WWDC 2022, you may know everything about them. But hopefully you will learn something about live activities in this quick overview, or you will enjoy the snippets to get started with your own live activity.
Not just a Widget on the lock screen
From a developer point of view, a live activity is provided through your app’s widget extension and uses WidgetKit, so it is indeed a widget. But it also appears in the Dynamic Island…
