Widgets / Live Activities
Small, glanceable app surfaces on the home screen, Lock Screen, or Dynamic Island, showing useful state without opening the app.
See it
What it is
Widgets are small, glanceable views placed on a home screen, lock screen, or another system surface. They show a snapshot from your app and offer a few focused actions. Live Activities are Apple's time-bound cousin for something unfolding now, such as a delivery, ride, timer, or score, shown on the Lock Screen and supported Dynamic Island layouts. They arrived in iOS 16.1, alongside the Dynamic Island on iPhone 14 Pro.
Reach for a widget when the same compact answer matters repeatedly, and for a Live Activity when one event has a clear start and finish. On Apple platforms, WidgetKit supplies timeline entries and ActivityKit manages live state. Android home-screen widgets can be built with Jetpack Glance.
Gotcha: these surfaces are not miniature copies of the app. The system controls when widgets refresh, extensions have tight execution and memory limits, and taps should open a specific destination. Keep shared data in an app group or another platform-approved store, render useful stale state, and explicitly end a Live Activity when its event is over.
Ask AI for it
Add a WidgetKit widget and an ActivityKit Live Activity for [FEATURE]. Give the widget small and medium layouts backed by a TimelineProvider, with a useful placeholder, snapshot, stale state, and deep links into the exact app screen. Define one ActivityAttributes type with compact, minimal, expanded, and Lock Screen layouts, start it only from an explicit user action, update it from validated state, and end it when the event completes or expires. Share only the required data through an App Group container. Add the Android home-screen equivalent with Jetpack Glance, and test every family with long text, large type, and missing data.