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.

Live Activities are designed to be used up to 8 hours at a time. They are intended to display 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 take care of 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 Messaging

Things to Know about Live Activities

• Live Activities can be active for up to 8 hours until dismissed by the app or the user. If a live activity is not dismissed, it may be visible for an additional 4 hours on the device's lock screen before it is automatically removed. Alternatively, a dismissal date can be specified to dismiss the activity before the four-hour window ends automatically.
• An application must be 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 the specific Live Activity while they are in the application.