Apple Sports and Lock Screen Live Activities

Yesterday, in my piece on the new Apple Sports app, I wrote:

Live activities for your lock screen are available, but Sports doesn’t — yet — offer any Home Screen widgets.

A bunch of readers emailed to ask how to get Live Activities from Sports. Turns out, it’s not the new Sports app that provides them, it’s the existing TV app (which has offered them since last year in iOS 16). So if you want to follow a particular game from your lock screen, from the card in Sports for that game, you tap “Open in Apple TV”, and there you can tap “Follow Live”.

That’s a bit convoluted, really. But it wasn’t clear to me at all yesterday that you couldn’t initiate a Live Activity directly in Sports, because at the time I was writing, there weren’t any live sporting events.

(Also: I wondered yesterday why Journal is built-into iOS 17 but Sports is only available from the App Store. The obvious answer is that for the time being, Sports is only available in the US, Canada, and the UK.)

★ Thursday, 22 February 2024