Live Activity Guidelines ⇥ developer.apple.com

Apple (via Benjamin Mayo):

Avoid using a Live Activity to display ads or promotions. Live Activities help people stay informed about ongoing events and tasks, so it’s important to display only information that’s related to those events and tasks.

Apple once prohibited the use of Push Notifications to deliver ads, but developers abused it anyway. Notification ads are now permitted so long as users are allowed to opt out but, in practice, this rule does not seem to be enforced. Doordash is among the worst abusers of this, pushing ads to users’ devices daily, and sometimes more frequently than that.

A Live Activity would be the perfect way for an app like Doordash to update users’ on a delivery’s progress. Based on the company’s abuse of push notifications, I could not see myself enabling it. The Live Activity format is such a great enhancement to notifications and the iOS experience. It is unfortunate to see Apple shooting itself in the foot by allowing the worst developers’ behaviour instead of holding them to a basic standard of respect.