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Uber and Uber Eats Apps Preparing to Support Live Activities Feature on iPhone

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Apr 12, 2001
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iOS 16.1 was released in September with support for Live Activities in third-party apps. The feature allows iPhone users to stay on top of real-time events, such as a sports game or a food delivery order, right on the Lock Screen. Live Activities are also displayed in the Dynamic Island on the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max.

ios-16-live-activities-feature.jpg

In June, Apple previewed Live Activities support for Uber, Starbucks, and Nike Run Club, but we are still waiting on these apps to roll out this functionality.

Fortunately, it appears that Uber and Uber Eats are now preparing to support Live Activities. Both of the apps were updated in November and now display a Live Activities toggle in their respective menus in the Settings app. The feature is not yet functional for public use in either app, but Uber might be doing testing internally.

Live Activities will make it easy to track the status of an Uber ride or an Uber Eats delivery on the Lock Screen or in the Dynamic Island. There's still no timeframe for the feature launching in these apps, but support is clearly in the works.

Other popular third-party apps with Live Activities support include Flighty for flight tracking, FotMob for World Cup scores, Sports Alerts for sports scores, Citymapper for public transit, ParkMobile for parking, and CARROT Weather for weather forecasts. Apple's TV app will also support Live Activities for select sports games starting with iOS 16.2, which is currently in beta and expected to be released later this month.

(Thanks, Youssef Salem!)

Article Link: Uber and Uber Eats Apps Preparing to Support Live Activities Feature on iPhone
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/12/05/uber-preparing-live-activities-support/
Last edited:
nutmac

nutmac

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Mar 30, 2004
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Excellent but expensive Flighty app notwithstanding, I hope to see Live Activities support on airline apps soon.
 
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thomas3man

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Mar 7, 2022
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Pretty sure Uber and Uber Eats are waiting for iOS 16.2 to be released. This next update allows Live Activities to be updated more frequently. This improves the accuracy dramatically. Especially for both of the Uber apps who strongly depent on the communication (location) between the drivers (i)Phone and the consumers iPhone.
 
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JulianL

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I’ve not seen any mention of it, maybe because I’ve not looked hard enough, but if Apple were to introduce the necessary code and developer APIs/tools to allow live activities to be echoed on a paired Apple Watch that would be a huge win for the Apple Watch I would have thought. One would want to give the user control in Settings as to which apps could echo their live activities display to the AW, presumably similar to how users can control notifications on a per-app basis (it could even be extra options in the Notifications section of Settings) and thought would have to be given to the UI on the AW about how to present and control (prevent overload) multiple apps wanting to mirror their live activities data but it should be doable. The developer modifications required to an app already modified to support live activities on the phone itself could be as simple as an extra declaration to say whether the app wanted to offer mirroring of its live activity display on the AW and if it did then also supply an alternative formatting template to define the layout of the live activity info on the AW screen which due to differing canvass sizes and shapes on the Watch vs the phone would need to be different. No extra actual code would be necessary in the app to render the live activity display on the AW since any dynamic variables appearing in the live activities window would already be being generated by the code already written by the app developer to create its live activity display in the phone.

Uber is an good example of an app developer that discontinued support for its AW app. If Apple put in the admittedly non-trivial effort to provide a mechanism to include AW as a live activities display we AW-wearing Uber riders could get back a fair amount of the lost functionality with the Uber developers having to do a 2 line code modification (one line to declare the availability of mirroring and the other line to declare the AW formatting template) to be able to take advantage of it.
 
doobydoooby

doobydoooby

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Oct 17, 2011
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NeoSe7en said:
I don’t understand why more developers aren’t on top of this feature. I expected apps like Uber, Door Dash and ESPN to have this right out of the gate.
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Well, at the moment the proportion of the iPhone owners that can actually use this is pretty small so the bang per buck is pretty low when you consider the global user base for their services. Its also unlikely that that user base is going to rise anytime soon since iPhone 14 pros are in very short supply to buy. But more than anything, at a time when tech companies are shedding staff because of the downturn, this feature doesn't really generate extra business for (eg) uber: it's a just a nice-to-have. When companies are tightening their belts, I imagine they will l be focussing developmental activity on those things that have the possibility to improve revenue.
 
alexandr

alexandr

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zinacef said:
I don’t think the toggle is in the app. It’s under Settings > Face ID & Passcode > Live Updates (toggle on). I could be wrong though.
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I realize that it's not in app settings, but why would it be under Face ID?.. I found the toggle settings for Uber (if you just scroll down to where you hit the apps. Lyft doesn't have that toggle. At least not yet. So I'm wondering how is it working...
 
dontwalkhand

dontwalkhand

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doobydoooby said:
Well, at the moment the proportion of the iPhone owners that can actually use this is pretty small so the bang per buck is pretty low when you consider the global user base for their services. Its also unlikely that that user base is going to rise anytime soon since iPhone 14 pros are in very short supply to buy. But more than anything, at a time when tech companies are shedding staff because of the downturn, this feature doesn't really generate extra business for (eg) uber: it's a just a nice-to-have. When companies are tightening their belts, I imagine they will l be focussing developmental activity on those things that have the possibility to improve revenue.
Click to expand...
You don’t need a 14 Pro to utilize this. Non DI phones will just show the same thing on the bottom of the screen instead.
 
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