Live Activities

Learn about Live Activities, a powerful and interactive push notification for iOS and iPadOS devices

Live Activities are a type of interactive push notification. Apple introduced them in October 2022 to enable iOS apps to provide real-time updates to their users that are visible from the lock screen and the dynamic island. This feature also became available to iPad devices in Jun 2023 as part of iPadOS 17.

Live Activities are designed to be used up to 8 hours at a time. They are great for to displaying changing data for live events, such as sports scores, delivery statuses, and other real-time transactional updates. Read more about why you may want to use Live Activities in our blog.

OneSignal is the easiest way to implement support for iOS Live Activities in your application. We handle helping you start, update, and end live Activities, as well as:

  • Managing the temporary push tokens associated with Live Activities
  • Supporting updating all active live activities with a single API call, for up to tens of millions of devices
  • Providing real-time analytics on your delivery of Live Activities and how users are engaging with them
  • Powering your other user engagement channels, such as Push Notifications, Email, SMS, and In-App Messages

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Try Live Activities for free!

If you have 10k+ subscribers, you can upgrade to use Live Activities.

Things to know about Live Activities

  • Live Activities can be active for up to 8 hours until dismissed by the app or the user. At 8 hours, the Live Activity is automatically removed from the Dynamic Island. However, if a Live Activity is not dismissed on the device's lock screen, it may be visible for an additional 4 hours before it is automatically removed. Alternatively, a dismissal date can be specified to dismiss the activity before the 4-hour window ends automatically.
  • An application must be in the foreground and open to start a Live Activity. Live Activities cannot be started remotely in response to a notification or a background task.
  • An application can have 5 Live Activities started at one time.
  • You do not need to get user permission before sending Live Activities. However, it is recommended that the user opts in for specific Live Activities while they are in the application.
  • OneSignal Customers on the free plan, with 10k subscribers or less, can send Live Activities for free. See our Pricing Page for more details.