Live Activities won’t be able to refresh as frequently in iOS 18

According to feedback that a developer received from Apple, Live Activities won’t be able to update as often as they were able to in iOS 17 and prior. While this won’t affect most apps, it’s still a change worth talking about.

The issue

App developer Nico posted about this on X this week, stating that they previously were able to update live activities every second. However, starting with iOS 18, they’ve only been able to update between 5 and 15 seconds. This is an issue for his app, where he used live activities to show his real time bike speed. Going forward, the bike speed will be behind by about 10 seconds, which could be problematic for some use cases.

Unfortunately, Apple says this is an intended change. The company says that each update requires writing data to disk, causing excess wear on your devices NAND (aka storage). Excessive updates are particularly problematic this year, now that Live Activities will sync to your Apple Watch with iOS 18 and watchOS 11.

Furthermore, the company states that Live Activities were never intended to create “real-time experiences”, and that it was never intended to be allowed beforehand, calling it a “hole in the API”.

Ironically, the developer also points out that Apple uses his exact use case as an example for Live Activities. On the developer website, Apple writes that a “workout app could show real time fitness metrics.” However, despite them saying this, it seems the company no longer wants to support this use case.

Wrap up

This shouldn’t affect Live Activities that have a clock feature, like Uber or Lyft, which display a timer counting down to your estimated arrival time. This is because the estimated arrival time is one update, and then the Live Activity counts down on its own, rather than the app pushing each clock update.

Apple introduced Live Activities in iOS 16, intending for them to be a quick way for you to get important updates from your favorite apps – right from your lock screen or Dynamic Island.

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