How can I make an interactive live activity?
Asked on 06/11/2025
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To create an interactive live activity, you can follow these guidelines based on the sessions from WWDC:
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Design for Apple Watch: Live activities on Apple Watch can be interactive. You can enable interactions like tapping a widget to perform actions, such as turning on a light. It's important to design your live activity to show only the necessary information to communicate significant states, like progress or actions required. For more details, you can refer to the session Design Live Activities for Apple Watch (00:02:43).
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App Intents: You can use App Intents to create interactive snippets that can integrate with live activities. This allows you to build interactive elements, such as configuring a food order before sending it to a restaurant. For more information, check out the session Explore new advances in App Intents (00:00:55).
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Widgets and CarPlay: Live activities can also be displayed in CarPlay, and you can customize their presentation for different environments. This involves using the Supplemental Activity Family to optimize the layout for smaller displays. For more insights, see the session What’s new in widgets (00:12:18).
By following these guidelines and utilizing the tools and frameworks provided by Apple, you can create engaging and interactive live activities for your apps.

Design Live Activities for Apple Watch
Starting in watchOS 11, Live Activities from your iOS app will automatically appear in the Smart Stack on a connected Apple Watch. Learn how to optimize the layout of your Live Activity for the wrist, and provide the right level of information and interactivity at the right time.

Turbocharge your app for CarPlay
Learn how to bring your Live Activities and widgets to CarPlay and CarPlay Ultra so people can view progress of their activities and see relevant information at a glance. Explore new template options available to all CarPlay apps, and learn how navigation apps can provide turn-by-turn metadata for display in the car’s instrument cluster or HUD.

Explore new advances in App Intents
Explore all the new enhancements available in the App Intents framework in this year’s releases. Learn about developer quality-of-life improvements like deferred properties, new capabilities like interactive app intents snippets, entity view annotations, how to integrate Visual Intelligence, and much more. We’ll take you through how App Intents is more expressive than ever, while becoming even easier and smoother to adopt. We’ll also share exciting new clients of App Intents this year like Spotlight and Visual Intelligence, and learn to write app intents that work great in those contexts.