Widgets & Live Activities

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Discuss how to manage and implement Widgets & Live Activities.

WidgetKit Documentation

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Live Activity in terminated state
Hi. I need some help in starting the live activity in terminated state using push notification. I have developed an app which does not sleep and always run even in the background state. It is pressure calculator. From sensor, it will receive the pressure and display the values in the app. Whenever the pressure reaches a certain point, it should display the alert in the dynamic island. As of now, it is displaying live activity in the foreground state. Working partially fine in the background state. But not working in the terminated state. but in the documentation it have been mentioned we can start the live activity using push notification from any state. Please help me to find a solution.
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Jul ’25
On iOS, using the AppIntents framework, I need a conditional AppShortcutsProvider
We have a Subscription based feature in our App, using which a user can say something like "Ask Mickey". However we want to enable this system Shortcut only when the user has subscribed to certain premium features. i.e. If the User is not subscribed to Premium Services, we do not want to show this Shortcut. However, when adding any conditional code inside AppShortcutsProvider, I am getting the following Compile Time errors: **'AppShortcutsProvider' property 'appShortcuts' requires builder syntax AppShortcut builders support only a platform availability if statements, not general if statements'**
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55
Jul ’25
Can We Display Screen Time Data in WidgetKit?
Hello, I am trying to create a Home Screen widget for iOS that displays device usage statistics — similar to the built-in Screen Time widget Apple provides. The goal is to show the average device usage for a specified period (daily, weekly, or monthly) and optionally include a comparison with the previous period. I noticed that Apple’s own Screen Time widget presents such information. However, after reviewing the public documentation, I could not find any available API that allows a developer to create a similar experience. To explore possible alternatives, I implemented a SwiftUI view inside a com.apple.deviceactivityui.report-extension using the Family Controls and Device Activity frameworks. The view works fine within the main app and the report extension context, but when I attempted to use the same view in a WidgetKit extension, I received an error at runtime. This suggests that views from com.apple.deviceactivityui.report-extension are not usable inside widgets, which I understand may be due to sandboxing or limitations of how the extension points are designed. So far, I’ve found no way to access cumulative or average usage data (screen time, app usage, etc.) from system APIs that can be shown in a widget context. My understanding is that Family Controls and Device Activity frameworks allow observing ongoing activity and building usage reports inside the app, but do not provide access to the same historical or summarized data that Apple’s own widgets display. Could you please confirm: Whether there is any supported way to access average device usage (screen time) data for use in a widget? If not, is this an intentional limitation due to privacy concerns, or is there a roadmap for exposing such APIs in the future? Are there any APIs or entitlements that could allow similar functionality via WidgetKit? Thank you for your time and support. Best regards,
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Jul ’25
Should `input-push-token` be added to all live-activity based payloads?
I'm struggling to understand what the impact of this flag is. Docs only say: For devices running iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 or later, you can add input-push-token: 1 to your payload to start a Live Activity and receive a new push token. After you receive a new push token, you can use it to send updates to a Live Activity. But things were working fine for iOS 17. Right? Does it somehow make the OS emit update tokens faster/more successfully? Should I include in all start, update, end events?
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Nov ’25
Detect if a widget is displayed in CarPlay vs. iPhone/iPad
I am looking into the new CarPlay support for systemSmall widgets introduced in iOS 26 (Apple documentation). I am trying to figure out if there is a way to programmatically detect whether the widget is currently being displayed on the iPhone/iPad home/lock screen or in CarPlay. So far, I haven’t found any information in the documentation or APIs that indicate how to distinguish between these environments. Is there an API, environment value, or best practice for handling this scenario? Thanks in advance for any insights!
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Dec ’25
Title and Subtitle in Control Widget on macOS Tahoe?
Hi 🙋 Has anybody gotten subtitles in macOS Tahoe Control Widgets to show up in their custom control widgets? Seems macOS is able to do it (see attached screenshot of the Bluetooth control widget), but my widget, which shows a title and subtitle on iOS, will only show the title on macOS. I tried all the different ControlWidgetButton init methods to no avail. I tried a VStack for my title and subtitle Texts, I tried just two Texts without a VStack, I tried the controlWidgetStatus and controlWidgetActionHint modifiers out of desperation... nothing worked. Any pointers much appreciated! Thank you, – Matthias
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Sep ’25
how to suppress sound of a live activity when app is foregrounded?
Regular apns will give you a willPresent callback and there you can decide to suppress showing the notification or suppress its sound etc. I know the iOS app will give you callbacks for when there's a contentUpdate, yet that doesn't give the option to change the sound. Is there a way to suppress sound of a received Live Activity when app is in foreground?
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100
Sep ’25
AppIntentConfiguration WatchOS & iOS inconsistent
I'm having problems with my released app with iOS & WatchOS 26 support. I've added AppIntentConfiguration support in the WatchOS app such that users can configure the complication. My complications also support multiple families and so I have slightly different configuration options available if its in the .accessoryRectangular slot or the .accessoryCircular one. This works fine on Apple Watch when editing the Watch face. Here you can then select the configuration options fine and they are correct for the different variants. However on iOS when configuring in the Apple Watch app on iPhone, the different complication size is ignored and the same configuration options are offered meaning they are wrong for one of them. I created a sample project, here is the app intent code: struct TestWidgetConfigurationIntent: AppIntent, WidgetConfigurationIntent { static var title: LocalizedStringResource = "New Widgets with Configuration" static var description = IntentDescription("Lots of stuff.") static var isDiscoverable: Bool { return false} init() {} func perform() async throws -> some IntentResult { return .result() } @Parameter(title: "Enable More Detail", default: true) var moreDetail: Bool @Parameter(title: "Enable Other Parameter", default: true) var otherParameter: Bool static var parameterSummary: some ParameterSummary { When(widgetFamily: .equalTo, .accessoryRectangular) { Summary("Test Info") { \.$moreDetail \.$otherParameter } } otherwise : { Summary("Test Info") { \.$moreDetail } } } } In WatchOS you get the correct configuration options: In iOS you do not, you get the same configuration option regardless of which family size you select: This could be a bug so I've filed feedback FB20328319. Otherwise if anyone has insights, it would be very appreciated. This is all tested on the current iOS 26.0 and WatchOS 26.0 versions. Thanks!
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191
Oct ’25
Unable to activate ActiveKit
Appears during code compilation Provisioning profile "iOS Team Provisioning Profile: ..*" doesn't include the com.apple.developer.ActivityKit entitlement, Has anyone encountered or resolved a similar issue where the ActiveKit feature was not found in the developer's identifier, despite not being activated in the developer's system?
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Sep ’25
Unable to activate ActivityKit
Appears during code compilation Provisioning profile "iOS Team Provisioning Profile: ..*" doesn't include the com.apple.developer.ActivityKit entitlement, Has anyone encountered or resolved a similar issue where the ActiveKit feature was not found in the developer's identifier, despite not being activated in the developer's system?
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Sep ’25
Live Activities Push-to-Start flows
Good morning, We are implementing Live Activities in a push-to-start flow. We wrap the listener for push to start tokens in a high priority task: if ptsListenerTask == nil || ptsListenerTask?.isCancelled == true { ptsListenerTask = Task(priority: .high) { [weak self] in for await pushToken in Activity<LiveAuctionAttributes>.pushToStartTokenUpdates { //Send token to back-end } } I've tried a few variations of this and they work well on most devices. I have seen a couple of devices that refuse to issue a push to start token. The user will have logging for the init flow and starting the PTS listener then the logs just go silent, nothing happens. One thing that seemed to work was getting the user to start a Live Activity manually (from our debugging tool) then the PTS token gets issued. This is not very reliable and working a mock live activity into the flow for obtaining a PTS token is a poor solution. Is anyone else seeing this and is there a known issue with obtaining PTS tokens? Thanks! Brad
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Nov ’25
What should your server do when apns returns a 410 Unregistered error for your token?
For our Live Activity Tokens, when we fire a payload, often apns is returning a response of 410 unregistered. Docs are saying: The device token is inactive for the specified topic. There is no need to send further pushes to the same device token, unless your application retrieves the same device token, refer to Registering your app with APNs Questions: Why does this happen? Does it only happen because the user changed their permission? Or there are other reasons? And when it does happen, what should we do about it? A. Should we keep the token on the server? Because perhaps the user will change their permission and the token becomes valid? That could leave us with lots of invalid tokens and us firing at them unnecessarily. Docs do say: Don’t retry notification responses with the error code BadDeviceToken, DeviceTokenNotForTopic, Forbidden, ExpiredToken, Unregistered, or PayloadTooLarge. B. Or should we remove the token from the server? That then requires app to re-register the token. But the problem with that is: When I went into App's settings from OS settings and toggled push notifications to on, the app was not launched into the background nor killed i.e. it requires explicit app launch by the user to re-register itself which isn't ideal... It means a user may turn on notifications from the OS settings and then assume that their push notifications should be back in business, but that won't happen if you toggle things from OS settings.
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248
Nov ’25
Live Activity – crashes on ActivityAuthorizationInfo() and Activity.activities
Hey! I'm working on enabling remotely started live activities. I'm running into 2 crashes: Upon initializing ActivityAuthorizationInfo Upon calling Activity<...>.activities array Both stack traces look like this: 0 libsystem_kernel.dylib +0xce0 _mach_msg2_trap 1 libsystem_kernel.dylib +0x4398 _mach_msg2_internal 2 libsystem_kernel.dylib +0x42b4 _mach_msg_overwrite 3 libsystem_kernel.dylib +0x40fc _mach_msg 4 libdispatch.dylib +0x1cc04 __dispatch_mach_send_and_wait_for_reply 5 libdispatch.dylib +0x1cfa4 _dispatch_mach_send_with_result_and_wait_for_reply 6 libxpc.dylib +0x107ec _xpc_connection_send_message_with_reply_sync 7 BoardServices +0xaea8 -[BSXPCServiceConnectionMessage _sendWithMode:] 8 BoardServices +0x17938 -[BSXPCServiceConnectionMessage sendSynchronouslyWithError:] 9 BoardServices +0xeef0 ___71+[BSXPCServiceConnectionProxy createImplementationOfProtocol:forClass:]_block_invoke They happen to a limited number of users, but not insignificant. Most are on iOS 18.6.2 and iOS 26.1, but there are others in the mix. I don't have a repro myself. It looks like the main thread gets blocked after we receive no response from these ActivityKit APIs. Both of these are called inside application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:. For ActivityAuthorizationInfo, we need the app to communicate with the server whether the user has live activities enabled; hence, calling this object's init as early as possible in the app. For activities array, I'd like to do some logging whenever the live activity is started or ended (for example, if activities array no longer contains any activities, we can log the activity as dismissed). For this logging to happen, as far as I understand, it has to happen inside didFinishLaunchingWithOptions since this is the only method being called upon the terminated app receiving background runtime when the live activity starts/ends remotely. After some research, one potential reason is ActivityKit APIs are just not ready to return values via xpc connection at app startup, so moving these methods to applicationDidBecomeActive could resolve the problem. That's fine for ActivityAuthorizationInfo init, but for accessing activities, there is no other place in the lifecycle to see if an activity has been dismissed (especially in the scenario where app is terminated, so we get only 30 seconds ish of background runtime). Curious if anyone has run into this or has any insights into ActivityKit API behavior.
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App Shortcuts Limitations
I've been implemented App Shortcuts into my apps which are localized for a variety of languages. The WWDC23 "Spotlight your app with App Shortcuts" has been extremely helpful in resolving my localized trigger phrases issue, but before I continue filling out all of the trigger phrases for my application I am concerned about a limitation that was mention in the video and need some additional information about it. The limitations noted in the video at minute mark 21:26 states that: Maximum 10 App Shortcuts (OK) Maximum 1000 trigger phrases... If I have 1 app and 10 shortcuts, and each shortcut only uses (.applicationName), this means I get to have 100 trigger phrases for each shortcut (for the sake of the discussion). What I'm unsure about is when I begin providing localization do the localized triggered phrases count toward the trigger phrase limit? Essentially, for every language I support do I have to drop 1/2 of all of my trigger phrases to stay under the limit? At the moment, my app is supporting 40 languages and I would like to know how localization affects the trigger phrase limit. Thank you!
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Dec ’25
Snippet Views don't render consistently, width not always respected
I've created a Snippet for my iOS app which I want to be able to run from the LockScreen via a Shortcuts widget. All works fine except when I run the shortcut and the App Snippet appears, it doesn't always render the SwiftUI view in the same way. Sometimes the width boundaries are respected and sometimes not. I've tested this on iOS 26.1 and iOS 26.2 beta 3 I think this is a bug but it would be great if anyone could see what I might be doing wrong if it's not. Incase it is a bug I've filed a feedback (FB21076429) and I've created a stripped down sample project showing the issue and added screenshots showing the issue. Basic code to reproduce issue: // Intent.swift // SnippetBug import AppIntents import Foundation import SwiftUI struct SnippetEntryIntent: AppIntent { static let title: LocalizedStringResource = "Open Snippet" static let description = IntentDescription("Shows a snippet.") // Don’t open the app – stay in the snippet surface. static let openAppWhenRun: Bool = false func perform() async throws -> some ShowsSnippetIntent { .result(snippetIntent: TestSnippetIntent()) } } struct TestSnippetIntent: SnippetIntent { static let title: LocalizedStringResource = "Snippet Intent" static let description = IntentDescription("Action from snippet.") @MainActor func perform() async throws -> some IntentResult & ShowsSnippetView { .result(view: SnippetView(model: SnippetModel.shared)) } } @MainActor final class SnippetModel { static let shared = SnippetModel() private init() { } } struct SnippetView: View { let model: SnippetModel var body: some View { HStack { Text("Test Snippet with information") Spacer() Image(systemName: "heart") }.font(.headline) } } struct Shortcuts: AppShortcutsProvider { static var appShortcuts: [AppShortcut] { AppShortcut( intent: SnippetEntryIntent(), phrases: [ "Snippet for \(.applicationName)", "Test Snippet \(.applicationName)" ], shortTitle: "Snippet", systemImageName: "barcode" ) } } You also need these lines in your main App entry point: import AppIntents @main struct SnippetBugApp: App { init() { let model = SnippetModel.shared AppDependencyManager.shared.add(dependency: model) } var body: some Scene { WindowGroup { ContentView() } } } This is correct This is incorrect
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147
Nov ’25
How can you update a Live Activity without hitting "Allow"?
(I truly appreciate all the responses you all have written for me :bow: ) I was under the assumption that for Live Activity, in order for you to be able to update the Activity, you need an update token. And for the OS to issue you the update token, user must hit the "Allow" from the lock screen. However based on these screenshots it seems that you don't need to hit "Allow" to be able to update the Live Activity. Live Activity was updated — even without the user hitting "Allow" So now I'm wondering if: Is hitting Allow required for the update token to get issued? Or that assumption is incorrect? In our tests (when connected to Proxyman, the OS emits the update token after user hits "Allow" / "Always Allow") If you don't hit allow, are there alternate ways to update the Live Activity without having the update token? I'm guessing you could set a short stale time and then when the OS launches the app in the background you query the server and then update the Live Activity. Is that a worthy approach? I also noticed that the "The Philly Inquirer" App has 'Background App Refresh" enabled, but this happened in 2 minutes. In our architecture assessments, after reviewing Apple's docs on 'Background Processing", we didn't think of it as a viable option, because it can't guarantee if the OS is given time in the next 2 minutes or 10 hours later when the phone is getting charged again. Are any of these workarounds viable or are there alternate approaches? Our requirement is: be able to use Live Activity between 2-72hrs after app install. (I mention this because perhaps Apple may impost some restrictions for new installs) be able to update an active Live Activity within 1-2 minutes after it has began.
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Dec ’25
Live Activity triggered by AlarmKit remains as an empty state
I configured my app to show a Live Activity when an alarm rings using AlarmKit. However, if I dismiss the Live Activity by tapping somewhere other than the X button, and then long-press the Dynamic Island, a new Live Activity appears that is long but contains no information. Currently, the only way I can remove this empty Live Activity is to press the X button while the alarm is in the snooze state. Pressing the X button on the initial alarm does not remove it. Is there any way to prevent this behavior or properly handle / clean up this empty Live Activity?
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2w
Intended Flow of Invalidating the pushToStartToken When User Logs Out
Hi, we start and update Live Activities with ActivityKit push notifications in our app, but want to do so only if the user is logged in. Therefore we only send the pushToStartToken to the server when a user logs in (or when the token changed and the user is still logged in.) When the user logs out, we remove that start token from our server so that no LA can be started while the app is in the logged out state. This means that the logout isn't happening immediately but is waiting for that deletion request to succeed. This could also fail and lead to the use rnot being able to log out, e.g. if the user has no internet access. If that deletion request would be fire and forget, we would end up in a state where the server still has the token and might start LAs without any user being logged in. The token flow for Remote Push Notifications is different, on the other hand: requesting a token asynchronously via UIApplication.shared.registerForRemoteNotifications() but invalidating it synchronously (at least from the app's perspective) on logout via UIApplication.shared.unregisterForRemoteNotifications(), which makes it way easier for us to make sure the app does not get notifications when no user is logged in. We're wondering if we're just holding it wrong or if our way of handling the LA token deletion is indeed the intended one?
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