Uber and Uber Eats Add Support for Live Activities on iOS

Uber has started rolling out Live Activities for both its flagship ride-hailing app and Uber Eats on iOS (via Reddit).

Live Activities are a new kind of notification, introduced in iOS 16, that updates in real-time to better communicate information pertaining to ongoing events such as sports games or, in Uber’s case, a ride/food order. They show up as detailed notifications on the Lock Screen or an interactive alert on the iPhone 14 Pro’s Dynamic Island.

For the Uber app, Live Activities show an animation of your ride or delivery’s progress. When you’re in your Uber, the Live Activity will display a progress bar indicating how close you are to your destination along with your estimated drop-off time. The drop-off time is updated based on your actual ETA.

As for the Uber Eats app, the Live Activity will present the live progress of your orders. It’ll tell you when your order is being prepared by the restaurant, when your delivery driver picks it up, and when it’s been delivered.

You can see the feature in action on the Lock Screen below, courtesy of Reddit user u/Rejuvenist:

“When you unlock, the Dynamic Island expands and you see a cab icon on it,” the user said. They noted that they’re from India, and some Reddit users said they don’t have Live Activities yet.

To see Live Activities, make sure you go to Settings > Uber (or Uber Eats) and enable the Live Activities option.

If you don’t see the Live Activities toggle for the Uber or Uber Eats app in Settings, make sure you’re on the latest version of iOS and have updated the respective app. It’s possible Uber is doing a gradual, staged rollout, so you might just have to wait until the feature reaches you.

Uber’s implementation of Live Activities isn’t perfect yet, according to users who have experienced it. In particular, there appear to be some bugs with how Uber’s Live Activity interacts with the built-in iOS Live Activity for when your iPhone’s GPS is in use.

Not every iOS app that could benefit from Live Activities has them yet, so Uber does at least score some points for adding them. You can check out our list of apps that support Live Activities to see which other apps support the new notification style.

Uber recently signed a 10-year agreement with Motional to provide autonomous rides and deliveries.