Home Assistant has added support for Live Activities on iPhone, enabling continuous, real-time updates on the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island, providing a more seamless smart home monitoring experience on iOS devices.
Home Assistant has added support for Live Activities on iPhone, bringing a more persistent way to surface smart home data on iOS devices. According to How-To Geek and Home Assistant’s own documentation, the feature is available through the Companion app on iOS 17.2 or later, with Home Assistant Core 2026.7.0 or later and Companion app 2026.9.0 or later required for support. The result is a notification format that stays visible on the Lock Screen and, on supported devices, in Dynamic Island.
The practical advantage is continuity. Rather than sending repeated alerts, Home Assistant can now present information that changes over time, such as a robot vacuum’s progress, a 3D print timer, or how long a door has been open. Home Assistant says a notification becomes a Live Activity when the payload includes live_update: true and a shared tag, with later updates replacing the same activity instead of creating new alerts. The company also notes that frequent push updates may be throttled on iOS, although that does not apply to local push delivery.
There is also some on-device intelligence. Home Assistant supports chronometer-style timers, which lets the iPhone update elapsed time itself rather than relying on constant server-side refreshes. That makes the system better suited to slow-moving tasks, such as washing-machine cycles or occupancy tracking, where the display needs to stay current without spamming the user with notifications.
Apple Watch users can benefit too. According to How-To Geek, Live Activities can mirror from iPhone to the watch and appear in the Smart Stack, giving users a quick wrist-level view of the same ongoing status. Apple Watch owners can disable that mirroring in the Watch app if they prefer not to see Home Assistant activities there.
The feature is useful, but not universal. Immediate events such as a window opening, motion detection or a leak are still better handled by standard notifications, especially if they need to bypass silent mode or Focus settings as a critical alert. Still, the change marks a meaningful improvement in how Home Assistant presents live household data, and it arrives as the wider ecosystem around iOS Live Activities continues to grow, with third-party tools such as HA LiveKit, Aivi and PushWard all aiming to extend similar functionality across Apple devices.
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