Previously, developers were able to refresh live activities every second, but in iOS 18 the shortest amount of time between updates will be 5 seconds. Apple stated that this change is intentional to prevent frequent writing to the iPhone's NAND (storage) chip. Frequent writing to a NAND chip decreases the overall life of the chip, so this is a welcome change. It will help preserve the iPhone's hard drive to last as long as it should, instead of prematurely shortening its life.
This is a bummer for certain live activities though, as Nico used it to track the speed of his bike. As stated on Nico's X account, "I used it for speed tracking of my bike. This metric is worthless with iOS 18. I don’t need to know my speed from 10 seconds ago. Apple clearly says 'real time' in their user interface guideline."
Nico on X:
No need to worry about live activities like DoorDash or Uber, as they rely on a clock mechanism. The clock does not need to be written over and over, so these will still appear in real-time. However, if your favorite live activity relies on updating every second, you may see a change when upgrading to iOS 18 in a few weeks.
credit: 9to5Mac
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