Flight Live Activities on iPhone, explained

A Live Activity is the card that stays on your iPhone’s Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island while something is under way. For a flight, it usually shows the next thing that happens: boarding, take-off, landing, the arrival gate. Apple gives it up to 8 hours of updates. After that, iOS ends it, and it can sit on the Lock Screen for up to 4 more hours.

It arrived in iOS 16.1, and Apple’s own example of a good use is flight updates. There’s no separate app. An app you already have starts one when it decides the moment has come.

One card that changes

A notification is a new message every time. A Live Activity is a single card that the app updates, so your Lock Screen doesn’t pile up with delay alerts, and you don’t open anything to read it.

On iPhones with a Dynamic Island, it moves there when you unlock. Touch and hold to expand it. The iPhone 18 Pro models can show up to three at once. Others show fewer, so a timer or a recording can take your flight’s place. On macOS Tahoe 26 or later it can appear on your Mac, and it can also show in CarPlay.

The 8-hour limit

A Live Activity can be active for 8 hours, starting from when it started and not from when your flight left.

Do the arithmetic for a nine-hour flight. If the app started the activity when you arrived at the airport, it runs out over the ocean, long before the part you most want to see. So on long flights, a well-behaved app starts it later, near boarding, and accepts that you’ll see less of the morning. An app can also start one remotely with a push, which needs a connection on your phone at that moment.

When the limit passes, iOS removes the card from the Dynamic Island at once. It stays on the Lock Screen, frozen at its last state, until you clear it or up to 4 hours go by.

With no signal

A Live Activity has no connection of its own. It shows what it was last given, and it gets news from the app or from a push over the network.

Two things keep working in airplane mode. A countdown runs on the phone, so “lands in 2 h 14 min” keeps counting down, based on the last estimate. Anything already on the card stays there. What can’t reach you is news: a revised landing time, a gate change or a new delay. If your flight has Wi-Fi and you’ve joined it, updates can get through, depending on what the airline’s network allows.

So read the countdown in flight as an estimate made before you lost signal. A phone that has been offline for three hours is showing a three-hour-old opinion.

Apple’s documents let an app mark content as out of date after a set time, and a good app will use that. When you land and reconnect, expect a jump.

Turning one off

Swipe left on the card to clear it. That removes this one activity. To stop an app starting them at all, go to Settings, tap Apps, tap the app, then tap Live Activities. Not all apps have that setting. There’s no single switch for every app that I could find in Apple’s guides.

If a card won’t leave after the flight, it’s usually an app that didn’t end its activity properly. It will go by itself within hours, and swiping clears it sooner.

Things this page isn’t sure about

Apple doesn’t publish a clear statement of how much a Live Activity costs in battery, and it limits how often apps can update through a budget it doesn’t spell out. Apple’s documents also change between releases, so I’ve quoted the 8 and 4 hour figures as they stood on Nov 7 2026.

Your phone may not be the only thing that knows about the flight. If someone’s meeting you, send them a link so they aren’t reading your Lock Screen by text message. A flight marked “landed” and one marked “arrived” are different events, as this page explains. Once you’re on the ground, the hour ahead is laid out in how long from landing to the curb.

On your flight, the Skycap Live Activity starts about 3 hours before the gate time, or later on a long flight so landing still falls inside Apple’s limit. It keeps counting with no signal, and you can start or remove it from the Flight page’s More menu. What it shows in the air