Good morning,
if I understood correctly, Live Activities will come on a later iOS 16 update and are not present on the current iOS 16 beta. I think that might explain the lack of documentation on the subject.
What I'd like to understand is what could be the best path to take to make sure we're prepared to build a Lock Screen widget with Live Activities.
Is a Home Screen widget a good starting point?
Does anyone know?
Can an Apple engineer shine some light into the topic?
Thank you
I asked the same thing during WWDC22 Labs and the API behavior and design is pretty much on lock down.
Taking hints from the system and the use cases that Apple has demonstrated, a package delivery, a sports event score change, a ride share service, these are all things that seem to be remote server updated. Meaning the phone can't do them on their own. Maybe you could do a conference planner/scheduler Live Activity that is all locally cached, but the use cases were telling to me. I have to imagine it will look like WidgetKit but have some aspect of content-available push that maybe goes right to your widget / live activity extension. Or to your app and then reload timeline if truly like widget kit.
I'd also bet that just like widgets on home and Lock Screen, Live Activities will be 100% SwiftUI for visuals. So my vote goes to learning "systemMedium" widget family, and SwiftUI. If you make a systemMedium Home Screen widget visually, hopefully it would be reusable for your live activity view.
Out of curiosity, what is your use case? How often would you want to refresh the live activity? This was also something I talked about in my lab, trying to get info on refresh policies--nothing :) Guess we will have to wait. I was encourage to #filefeedback on my ideas for Live Activities so Apple can see what we want to build.
It looks like Live Activities is a combination of push notifications (initiated locally or remotely) into a single widget-like notification. So updates are triggered with notifications and the element itself will more likely act as a widget. It is unclear if button elements are allowed for direct control (as we see in music activity). If not then it's pure mid-size widgets, so I'd start with building a widget for your app.
