Live Activities are a way to display up-to-date information on your user's iPhones and iPads without having your app open.

Apple introduced this feature 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.

You can initiate a Live Activity whether or not the end-user has the mobile app open, and they can be visible on a lock screen for up to 8 hours. They are great for displaying changing data for live events, such as sports scores, delivery statuses, and other real-time transactional updates. Read more about use cases in our why you may want to use Live Activities 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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Feature availability

Live activities are available on all plans except for Free plans with more than 10,000 opted-in subscribers.

If you have more than 10,000 opted-in subscribers on a Free Plan, you can upgrade to use Live Activities.

Feel free to reach out to Support if you require any more guidance or help with pricing.

What 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.
• With iOS 17.2+, Live Activities can now be started remotely.
• An application can have 5 Live Activities started at one time.
• You do not need to get user permission before sending Live Activities. The first Live Activity they receive is provisional (has "allow" and "don't allow" options). 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.

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Android Live Notifications

Live Activities are an iOS feature, but you can achieve similar capabilities with Android Live Notifications.

Add our mobile SDK & Live Activity code to your app

If you haven't already, you will need to set up our Mobile SDK in your app. Apple did not design Live Activities for web.

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Developers: Live Activities setup guides

If you setup our iOS SDK using Swift or Objective-C, you can follow our Live Activities developer setup docs.

If you are using one of our wrapper SDKs (React Native, Flutter, Unity, Cordova etc.), see Cross-platform Live Activity SDK setup.

For Android apps, you can implement Android Live Notifications.

If you are not a developer, see Manage Team Members to invite them as admins to your app and share this guide!

You can continue following the steps below to configure in-app messages while your developer sets up the SDK if they haven't already.

Sending at scale

When creating Live Activities, it is recommended that you follow the same guidelines that you would for push notifications. In order to achieve the fastest possible delivery, you should keep segment filters simple and ensure that you have added the NSSupportsLiveActivitiesFrequentUpdate value to YES in your info.plist if you want to send with a higher frequency. Setting the priority parameter to 10 should be used when sending any Live Activity request, as Apple has internal thresholds in which they will throttle requests that use the highest priority when sending requests. For information on the budget for high priority Live Activities, see Apple's documentation here.

Segments & subscriptions

Live Activities do not have their own Subscription. Instead they are shown to users that have a mobile push subscription. However, unlike push notifications, Live Activities do not have a subscription status. This means that when you create Segments, the mobile push subscriptions that fit the segment criteria are eligible to receive the Live Activity even if the push subscription is unsubscribed from push.

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Live Activity segments

Segments used for Live Activities include both subscribed and unsubscribed iOS mobile push subscriptions.

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Send your Live Activities!

You should now be equipped with everything you need to know about Live Activities.

See our Live Activities guide to start sending!