Live Activities in iOS 18 won’t refresh as often

As reported in 9to5Mac, Apple appears to have confirmed that in iOS 18 , Live Activities will no longer be quite so live. Currently, developers are able to get Live Activities to update every second, but in iOS 18, this will seemingly no longer be the case. An app developer called Nico posted on X that with the latest beta version of iOS 18 , updates to Live Activities on his app are only possible every 5 to 15 seconds.

After reaching out to Apple, he received a response stating that “Live Activities was never intended to be used to create real-time experiences” and that the fact that it is currently possible is due to a hole in the API which has been fixed in iOS 18. It appears that all Live Activities in iOS 18 will take much longer to update than is currently the case.

What are Live Activities in iOS?

Interactive notifications with supposedly real-time updates

In iOS 16 , Apple introduced a new feature called Live Activities. This feature shows a large notification on your Lock Screen that in iOS 17 can be updated as often as once every second. If you’re using a sports app to follow a live game, for example, the Live Activities notification can show the real-time score of the game in a notification on your Lock Screen. If you’ve ordered an Uber, a Live Activities notification can show you how much longer you have to wait for your ride to arrive in real time.

If you have an iPhone 14 Pro or iPhone 14 Pro Max , or any of the iPhone 15 lineup, you can also see Live Activities in the Dynamic Island at the top of your iPhone, allowing you to keep track of live updates as you continue to use your iPhone. If your phone doesn’t support Dynamic Island, you can receive a temporary banner notification that will pop up on your unlocked iPhone if the Live Activity is updated.

The Live Activities feature is available for a wide range of iPhone apps . Step counter apps can display a live tally of your current steps, weather apps can update with information about when it’s going to start raining, and flight tracking apps can give you updates on departure and arrival times for flights as the information changes.

Live Activities is being changed in iOS 18 to reduce wear on memory hardware

Updates may take as much as 15 seconds to appear

Apple/Pocket-lint

App developer Nico, who first tweeted about the change to Live Activities in iOS 18, was previously able to update the Live Activities notification for his app every second. This was vital for an app that is intended to display the real-time speed of a bike via a Bluetooth connection .

When using iOS 18, Live Activities will only update anywhere from between 5 and 15 seconds. This means that the speed displayed in the Live Activities notification could be as much as 15 seconds behind the actual current speed. After contacting Apple, Nico received feedback that Live Activities is functioning as intended in iOS 18. The response stated that every update to Live Activities requires writing data to the iPhone’s physical memory, increasing wear on the NAND chip. The limit on updates is intended to reduce this wear.

The response goes on to say that it was only possible to update Live Activities at a rate of once every second due to a hole in the API which has now been fixed. Bizarrely, it claims that “Live Activities were never intended to be used to create real-time experiences”, which is kind of strange for a feature in which includes the word “live.”

For some Live Activities, such as a live sports score, updating every 15 seconds isn’t going to make a huge difference. However, for apps that are trying to show genuine real-time data, this new limit will have a big impact on how useful Live Activities can be. It seems unlikely that Apple will change its tune before the official release of iOS 18, meaning that Live Activities will no longer be quite as live as they used to be.