Get Started With The Dynamic Island and Live Activities in iOS 16.1

It doesn’t take much code to give users a lot of information

Photo by Zunnoon Ahmed on Unsplash

Apple’s documentation tells you how to get started with the Dynamic Island, which animates information around the iPhone 14 Pro’s new detached camera notch.

In order to build this project, you will need to be running at least Xcode version 14.1 beta. This example comes mostly from Apple’s documentation, but this example gives you more control over the data that is sent to the Activity that lives in the Dynamic Island.

There are 2 compact views and 4 expanded views, as seen here:

GIF by the author

Create a new iOS project, and select the project itself from the Project Navigator in the left panel.

Click the Info tab of the project settings, hover the mouse over the last entry, and click the + button to add a new property. This new property should be called NSSupportsLiveActivities, the value should be of type Boolean, and the value should be YES.

It is important that this is in the info.plist of your app target, not any of its extensions.

Let’s get started

I’m going to create a Form Section that provides control for the amount of time in the future that I want my Live Activity to occur.

This next view shows what I want the user to be able to change about the Live Activity. Every part of the Dynamic Island will be given a custom string, although I recommend keeping them short as many of them are designed to be small icons.

Emoji characters will work 😀