Apple released the Live Activities feature with the release of iOS 16.1, a couple of years back. Live Activities are essentially interactive notifications that allow you to keep an eye on things happening in real-time right from your the Lock Screen on your iPhone.
Your Apple Watch also supports options for staying on top of the Live Activities. You can set your Apple Watch to view Live Activities and also set up your Apple Watch to show Live Activities even when your wrist is down.
Here is how you can Setup and use Live Activities on your Apple Watch
- Open the Watch app on your iPhone
- Tap on Smart Stack to get started
- Enable ‘Allow Live Activities’ here
- You can also enable ‘Auto-Launch Live Activities’ here so that your Apple Watch automatically launches them when the live activity begins on your iPhone
Apple also provides you the ability to pick and choose the apps for which you want visibility on your Apple Watch, when the app starts showing ‘Live Activities’ on the iPhone.
In order to do this, scroll down to the section ‘Mirror iPhone Live Activities From’ and tap to select an app for which you want to mirror the ‘Live Activities’ from your iPhone.
On this screen, Enable ‘Mirror Live Activity from iPhone’ and either set the Auto-launch option to off or pipe it to the Smart stack on your Apple Watch.
By default, when you enable ‘Allow Live Activities’, all the apps that support ‘Live Activities’ are enabled to show them on the Apple Watch.
You can choose to suppress the live Activities feature by specific app using this section of the app.
A final tip when using the Smart Stacks feature on your Apple Watch. This currently allows you to add upto 8 widgets. For those who are new to using Smart Stacks and are often annoyed to see them automatically pop-up on your watch, remember that it gets enabled with the rotation of then digital crown. So if your crown is inadvertently getting in contact with your shirt cuffs etc, you may see the widgets appear on your watch.
What are some of the widgets that you are currently using with your Smart Stack?
