When your app is in the background, iOS will eventually suspend it to save battery. Live Activity works around this by keeping a small, always-visible indicator on your Lock Screen and Dynamic Island (on supported iPhones), which signals to iOS that your app is actively doing something, in this case, continuously sensing in the background.
Requires iOS 26 or later. This feature is not available on Android or older iOS versions.
How to turn it on
You have two ways to enable it:
Option 1: From the banner (quickest) A banner labelled “Live activity” appears directly in the main screen of the app. Tap the toggle on the right side of that banner. After toggling the live activity on, the banner will dissapear and a small icon will appear in the top right of the screen allowing you to turn it back off.
Option 2: From Settings Go to Settings → Sensing settings and flip the switch inside the Background Sensing card.
Once enabled, the status below the switch will change to “Currently active”.
How to turn it off
Go to Settings → Sensing settings and flip the switch off. The app will ask you to confirm before stopping — tap Disable to proceed, or Cancel to leave it running.
What happens when it stops?
Background sensing will stop in three situations:
- You manually disable it via the settings or banner toggle.
- The selected duration expires (e.g. after 3 days if that was your choice).
- iOS terminates the Live Activity itself (this can happen if the device runs critically low on battery, or if iOS decides to end it).
The OS will show a orange ‘!’ sign indicating that the live activity was suspended early, the user is required to turn it back on by going to the app and toggling the switch again.
When toggling the live activity, after approximately 5 minutes, the OS will show a confirmation dialog asking the user to proceed or to cancel the activity, it is crucial that the user is aware of this and that they click to proceed.
Battery usage note
The app displays an indicator when this feature is active: background sensing uses more battery than normal. If battery life is a concern, choose a shorter duration or disable the feature when you don’t need continuous monitoring.