Showing a countdown without seconds in ActivityKit

I'm using Text(targetDate, style:.relative) to show how a countdown of minutes until a given event. Unfortunately, this includes seconds, which takes unnecessary space and can get quite distracting when used on the dynamic island.

There are many examples of apps that show estimates like "7 minutes" or "7 min" but how do they get the countdown to update? Are background updates reliable enough for this? Surely they don't send a push notification every minute to update the remaining time? Or is there some formatting option that I'm missing?

Replies

My understanding is that Apple intentionally limits control over timer text fields in order to implement always-on-display support for these. If you have an always-on-display, the OS will replace the seconds of the timer with dashes and only update the minutes while the device is locked. I also found no way of only displaying minutes.