How do Live Activities work?

Justin Clarke-Salt

A Live Activity is the panel that appears on your Lock Screen, and in the Dynamic Island on iPhones that have one, showing your next trains without you needing to unlock or open anything. Next3Trains uses one to keep your next two departures in front of you while you’re actually travelling. This needs iOS 16.2 or later.

Starting one

You don’t start it manually. During one of your commuting windows, the app starts a Live Activity for the saved route whose departure station you’re nearest to. Opening the app also refreshes whichever one is running. Windows that run past midnight work too since version 1.9 - see How do commuting hours work?.

Only one Live Activity runs at a time, and it always tracks the leg you’re nearest to. If your journey has more than one leg, opening the iPhone app will end the previous leg’s activity and, as long as you’re still inside a commuting window, start a new one for where you now are. Outside your windows nothing new is started - since version 1.11 that also means the morning’s activity no longer comes back when you open the app in the evening.

Where it appears

  • The Lock Screen, laid out like the train rows in the app.
  • The Dynamic Island - tap and hold to expand it for the full picture, or glance at the compact view alongside whatever else is running.
  • Your Apple Watch, in the Smart Stack, on watchOS 11 and later.

How current it is

While the app is closed, updates are pushed to the activity from the backend, but only when something actually changes - so it isn’t re-rendering constantly for no reason. In practice the train data behind it can be four or five minutes old, the same as the widgets. Trains that have departed drop off on their own, within a minute or so.

Ending

Once all the trains it started out tracking have departed, the activity ends by itself and clears off your Lock Screen shortly after. You can also swipe it away at any time, and open the app again later - during a commuting window - to get a fresh one.

Not on Mac

Live Activities are an iOS feature. The Mac version of Next3Trains doesn’t have them - see Next3Trains on Mac.