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Does BusyCal for iOS support Live Activities for upcoming events?

BusyCal for iOS does not currently offer a Live Activity for upcoming events, so there is no live notification for your next event on the Lock Screen or in the Dynamic Island.

Why it isn't available yet​

We think Live Activities are a great fit for calendar events — they stand out far more than a Lock Screen widget — and we have had a BusyCal version in internal testing for some time.

We have held it back because Live Activities are not yet dependable enough for events, and the problems are not specific to BusyCal. Developers have widely reported the same failures across many apps:

  • They stop updating. Once the iPhone is locked, or the app is no longer running, an activity can quietly stop refreshing and leave old information on screen. In that report, an Apple engineer confirmed these updates are held back on purpose, which is not what the documentation describes.
  • They can get stuck. An activity that should have finished sometimes stays on the Lock Screen anyway, and these leftovers can survive force-quitting or even deleting the app.
  • Long events do not fit. iOS allows a Live Activity at most 8 hours of updates and removes it after 12. All-day and multi-day events cannot be shown for as long as they actually last.

We have reported what we are seeing to Apple. Apps that do offer Live Activities today generally work around these limits by pushing constant updates from their own cloud servers. BusyCal syncs directly with your calendar services and does not route your data through our servers, so that workaround is not open to us in the same way.

Planned, but not scheduled

We intend to release Live Activities for upcoming events once these reliability problems are resolved. We do not have a release date to share.

What you can use today​

BusyCal includes Lock Screen and Home Screen widgets that keep your upcoming events visible without opening the app.

  • Lock Screen widgets can show your next event, what is happening now and next, or a countdown to your next timed event.
  • Home Screen widgets show upcoming events, a calendar grid, or your tasks, in several sizes.
tip

See Widgets for the available widget types, sizes, and options, and for choosing which calendars your widgets show.

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