Live Activities will launch for the iPhone with iOS 16.1

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One of the best features of iOS 16 is finally showing up.

Live Activities on the Lock Screen in iOS 16
Live Activities on the Lock Screen in iOS 16 (Image credit: Apple)

Apple keeps rolling out the software updates. As if things couldn't get more exciting during an iPhone release week!

Today, the company released the first developer beta of iOS 16.1. As part of the new beta, Apple finally rolled out support for Live Activities, its new Lock Screen feature for the iPhone. With iOS 16.1 and Xcode 14.1, developers can now work on adding support for Live Activities to their app:

Discover how you can build Live Activities for your apps using the new ActivityKit framework, now available in iOS 16.1 beta and Xcode 14.1 beta. Live Activities help people keep track of your app’s content with real time updates. Your app’s Live Activities display on the Lock Screen and in Dynamic Island — a new design that introduces an intuitive, delightful way to experience iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Live Activities and ActivityKit will be included in iOS 16.1, available later this year. Once the iOS 16.1 Release Candidate is available, you’ll be able to submit apps with Live Activities to the App Store.

What is Live Activities?

Live Activities is a new feature for the Lock Screen in iOS 16. Have you ever been tracking a sports game and get a ton of notifications getting score updates? Well, say goodbye to all of those.

Live Activities will create one dynamic notification at the bottom of your Lock Screen that can update in real-time. The feature works for any kind of app that you'd want to track progress including sports, fitness, ride-share- food delivery, and more:

Live Activities is a new feature that helps users stay on top of things that are happening in real time, such as a sports game, workout, ride-share, or food delivery order, right from the Lock Screen.

iOS 16.1 is only available for developers for now so they have time to work on implementing the feature before it is released to everyone later this fall. It's currently unclear when iOS 16.1 will be available to public beta testers or everyone else so, in the meantime, we'll have to settle for iOS 16!

That's out now, by the way, so you might want to get on updating to that.

Joe Wituschek
Joe Wituschek
Contributor

Joe Wituschek is a Contributor at iMore. With over ten years in the technology industry, one of them being at Apple, Joe now covers the company for the website. In addition to covering breaking news, Joe also writes editorials and reviews for a range of products. He fell in love with Apple products when he got an iPod nano for Christmas almost twenty years ago. Despite being considered a "heavy" user, he has always preferred the consumer-focused products like the MacBook Air, iPad mini, and iPhone 13 mini. He will fight to the death to keep a mini iPhone in the lineup. In his free time, Joe enjoys video games, movies, photography, running, and basically everything outdoors.