Live Activities on Mac: Which Apps Show Up, and Where

#Which iPhone apps produce one

There is no list of Mac apps to install, because the app that starts a Live Activity is always the one on the phone. Anything that already draws one on the iPhone Lock Screen is a candidate: rides and deliveries such as Uber and Uber Eats, flight tracking such as Flighty, live sports scores, a workout, a timer. The Mac is the second screen for it. If what you actually want is a status area that reacts to what the Mac is doing, that is a different category of software, mapped in the Dynamic Island for Mac roundup.

The corollary matters more than the examples. An app that never adopted Live Activities on iOS has nothing to send, and no Mac setting will conjure one. So before troubleshooting anything, check the phone: if the activity is not on the iPhone Lock Screen, it is not going to be in the Mac menu bar either.

The cheapest test of the whole pipeline is the iPhone’s own Clock app. Start a timer on the phone and look at the top right of the Mac. A counting-down timer there means the relay works and the question is only which of your apps support the feature. Nothing there means the problem is the setup, not the app.

#Where it lands, and what a click does

The activity appears among the status items at the right end of the menu bar, not in a notification banner and not in Notification Center. How much of it you see depends on the room left up there. With space, macOS draws a compact version of the activity itself. Without space, it collapses to a small icon, which is the usual explanation for a feature that looks broken but is actually working and squeezed.

Two clicks do two different things, and the second one is the important one:

• One click expands the item into the full activity, the detailed layout familiar from the iPhone Lock Screen. This stays on the Mac.
• Double click hands you to the phone. iPhone Mirroring opens the source app on the iPhone and streams it into a window on the Mac, because the Mac has no copy of that app’s state to act on.

Menu bar space is therefore a functional setting here rather than a cosmetic one. On a notched MacBook the strip is already cut in two by the camera housing, and each extra status icon brings the compact view closer to becoming a glyph. Hiding menu bar icons buys the room back, and the wider menu bar guide covers what can be reordered or removed for good.

#One switch on the Mac, one per app on the iPhone

The controls are split across both devices, which is why people turn something off and find it still there. The Mac holds the master switch, the iPhone holds the per-app switches, and dismissing a single running activity is a third, separate gesture.

Settings paths as Apple documents them for macOS Tahoe 26 and iOS. The inner Live Activities switch is new in macOS 26 and is on by default after the update.

Two neighbouring rules are worth knowing before you go hunting for a bug. Dismissing an activity with the close button only lasts as long as that activity: the next order or timer from the same app arrives normally. And where an app’s entry says the app is installed on this Mac, Apple’s rule is that its notifications come from the Mac app and not also from the iPhone copy, so the settings you tune on the phone stop applying to that one. Clearing a notification on the phone also clears it on the Mac.

#Whether the relay applies to your setup

Live Activities ride on iPhone Mirroring, the Continuity feature from macOS Sequoia, so every iPhone Mirroring requirement applies, plus one more floor on the Mac side.

Apple’s iPhone Mirroring requirements, plus the macOS 26 floor the Live Activities layer adds.

The region line has no workaround and is the most common reason a correctly configured Mac shows nothing. Apple has kept iPhone Mirroring out of the European Union since launch and said around WWDC25 that macOS Tahoe would not change that, citing regulatory uncertainty under the Digital Markets Act. The relay goes with it. The hardware line rules out anything older than Apple silicon or a T2 chip, and Apple's macOS Tahoe compatibility list settles that model by model.

#The activities your Mac cannot post

Live Activities are created with ActivityKit, and the availability line on the framework’s Activity class is the whole story: iOS 16.1 and later, iPadOS 16.1 and later. There is no macOS row, so a Mac app has no call to make.

Picture what that rules out. A forty-minute build, a video export, a large upload, a Time Machine backup: precisely the long-running, glanceable work the format was designed for, all of it happening on the Mac, none of it able to claim the slot. Apple’s own documentation describes ActivityKit as sharing live updates on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and the Mac, which is true for the Mac as a display surface and not as a place to create one. iPadOS 26, by contrast, uses Live Activities natively to report the progress of intensive background work.

#What fills the Mac-side gap

The gap predates Tahoe, so third-party status apps have been filling it for years. They read Mac sources directly instead of relaying anything: the track that is playing, the next calendar event, a device that just connected, volume and brightness, a timer. Nothing goes through ActivityKit, which is why these apps work on a Mac with no phone paired to it, and equally why none of them will ever show an Uber Eats order.

NotchBay is this site’s own app in that category, so weigh the description accordingly. It draws its activities around the notch rather than in the menu bar: now playing with a waveform and media controls, the next calendar event with one-click join, AirPods and Bluetooth device battery on connect, the volume and brightness HUD in the notch instead of Apple’s overlay, a focus timer, and weather for a chosen city. It also carries Zoom and Google Meet call controls, on-device dictation through Apple’s SpeechAnalyzer, and a clipboard tray of the last 60 clips sorted by type, which is 59 more than macOS keeps by itself according to the clipboard history reference.

The limits belong in the same breath. NotchBay needs macOS 26 or later and nothing earlier, it is designed for a MacBook with a notch, and on a Mac without one the island runs as a small floating pill at the top edge instead. Call controls need the Accessibility permission, the Google Meet bridge works through Chromium browsers such as Chrome and Brave rather than Safari, and the tray holds 60 clips plus pinned ones rather than an unlimited archive. It is $9 one-time, signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, and it is not on the Mac App Store.

The two things do not substitute for each other. Apple’s relay is the route to phone activities on a Mac and no third-party app can reproduce it. A Mac-side app is the route to Mac status, and Apple ships nothing for that.

#Two things people hit next

#What this means for the notch

Apple put the relay in the menu bar, the one strip a notched MacBook has already cut in half. So a borrowed phone activity and your existing status icons now spend the same budget, and losing that contest turns a readable compact view into a glyph. The notch itself stays out of it: macOS still gives that space no job, and a phone-shaped relay was never going to reach it. Anything that wants to report what the Mac is doing, a build, an export, a call in progress, has to draw its own surface up there, because ActivityKit offers it no slot to ask for.