Radar: show Live Activities in the watchOS Smart Stack
This post is the content of feedback FB13680829 submitted to Apple on 9 March 2024. If you support this idea, please duplicate the feedback.
Title
Show LiveActivity information in the watchOS Smart Stack
Area
Something else not on this list
Type of feedback
Suggestion
Description
iOS apps may display Live Activities on the lock screen, providing a great way for the user to track something which is important to them.
But as an active watchOS user, my Apple Watch is my preferred way of finding glanceable information. Widgets can reside in the smart stack, but they need to be manually added by the user, meaning that they lack the impulsiveness of a Live Activity. They also cannot be updated via remote push notifications.
Suggestion: if the customer has an Apple Watch paired to their iPhone, and a Live Activity is started on the iPhone, then the Live Activity UI should also be shown in the watch Smart Stack.
As an app developer, I would love to see a new initialiser for the ActivityConfiguration type which adds a closure for defining UI for a watchOS Smart Stack. Ideally this would be in the iOS target, so it's available to iOS apps which do not have a companion watchOS app.
First published 9 March 2024