I think one of my favourite things about the iPhone 14 Pro Max is the Dynamic Island, where Apple has taken a potential flaw – the housing for its front-facing sensors – and turned it into a charming, useful and fun visual feature. And it's getting better already because with the launch of iOS 16.1 the iPhone supports Live Activities in third-party apps.
Live Activities appear on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island (which is only currently in the iPhone 14 Pro models and not the standard iPhone 14 or iPhone 14 Plus), providing little nuggets of information – the latest scores in a football game, the ETA of your Uber driver and so on. And thanks to MacRumors, you can see at a glance which third-party apps have already embraced the new feature. As you'll see, it's a pretty diverse collection already – and these are just the early adopters. There will be lots more to come.
Carrot Weather app
Which apps use Live Activities and Dynamic Island in the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max?
According to MacRumors, the line-up so far includes the skiing and snowboarding app Slopes, the flight tracker Flighty, mountaineering app Landscape and the time management and productivity app Forest.
One of my favourite apps, the bad-tempered CARROT Weather, is there too, and the specialist sun-finding app Lumy – useful for photographers who want to catch the golden hour, as well as anyone else interested in the sun's location throughout the day – uses live activities too.
Cooking apps Crouton and Pestle make me hopeful that my recipe/cooking app Paprika will follow their lead and put its timers and other key information on the Lock Screen, while workout app Liftin' is the first of what I'm sure will be very many workout apps to take full advantage of the Live Activities functionality.
There are lots more – US football scores, credit card reward tracking, budgeting, TV remote control apps and various time-related apps – and you can expect the numbers to swell even more as the bigger-name app developers update their apps too.
I really like Live Activities, whether they're on the Lock Screen or in the Dynamic Island: they're another way in which iOS 16 has made my iPhone even more personal and useful. Live Activities are available on any iPhone that runs iOS 16.1, but the Dynamic Island support is only for the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max.
