Live Activities macOS 26: They Come From Your iPhone

#What macOS 26 actually shipped

The feature is a relay, not a new macOS capability. A Live Activity is started by an app on the phone: the food order, the ride, the timer, the score. What macOS 26 Tahoe added is the ability to draw the ones already running on a paired iPhone into the Mac menu bar. The apps did not change and no developer had to opt in, which is why apps that already supported Live Activities on iOS turned up on the Mac the day people updated. If what you were after is a status area that reacts to what the Mac itself is doing, that is a different category of software, mapped in the Dynamic Island for Mac roundup.

What you see depends on how much room the menu bar has left. With space, macOS draws a compact view of the activity itself. Without it, the activity collapses to a small icon. Click it once and it expands into the full detail view, the same layout the iPhone Lock Screen shows. Double-click it and iPhone Mirroring opens the source app on the phone, streamed into a window on the Mac.

That last step is the tell. The Mac is not running the activity. It is displaying a copy and handing you back to the phone the moment you want to act on it. Almost everything below follows from that one fact: the requirements, the single setting, the long list of reasons it shows nothing, and the hard ceiling on what a Mac app can put in the same place.

#What you need before anything appears

Apple lists these for iPhone Mirroring. The Live Activities layer adds one more floor on top: the Mac has to be on macOS Tahoe 26 or later, even though mirroring itself goes back to Sequoia 15.

Requirements as Apple states them for iPhone Mirroring, plus the macOS 26 floor that the Live Activities layer adds.

The iOS 18 line is the pleasant surprise, because most people assume the pairing has to be 26 on both sides. Apple confirmed at WWDC25 that a phone on iOS 18 or later is enough, so an iPhone held back on the previous release still feeds the Mac menu bar. The requirement that does bite is the hardware one: no T2 chip and no Apple silicon means no mirroring at all, which also rules out every Mac too old for Tahoe. The supported devices list has that model by model.

The region requirement has no workaround, and it is the single most common reason this feature is missing from a perfectly configured Mac. iPhone Mirroring has never shipped in the European Union, and Apple confirmed around WWDC25 that macOS Tahoe would not change that, citing regulatory uncertainty under the Digital Markets Act: Apple’s position is that opening the feature could oblige it to make the same technology available to third parties, including for mirroring non-Apple phones. Live Activities on the Mac ride on mirroring, so they are absent for the same reason. There is no toggle, no beta flag and no supported way around it.

#The switch that controls them

There is exactly one setting, and it is nested one level deeper than people expect. Open System Settings > Notifications, then Allow notifications from iPhone. Inside that is Allow Live Activities from iPhone, which Apple added in macOS Tahoe 26. Both have to be on. Switching the outer one off takes the Live Activities with it, which is why a Mac that was deliberately quietened for iPhone notifications last year shows nothing now.

Dismissing a single activity is separate from switching the feature off. Click the Live Activity in the menu bar to expand it, move the pointer over it, then click the close button in its corner. That removes that one activity from the Mac and leaves everything else alone.

Menu bar space is a real constraint here rather than a cosmetic one, because it decides whether you get a readable compact view or a bare icon. On a notched MacBook the usable strip is already split in two by the camera housing, and every status item competes for what is left. Hiding menu bar icons buys back the room, and the wider menu bar guide covers what can be moved or removed outright.

#When nothing shows up

Work down this list in order. It is sorted by how often each one turns out to be the answer, not by how likely it is to be your fault.

1. Check your region first. In the EU the feature does not exist, and no amount of settings work will summon it. Establish this before spending an hour on the rest.
2. Check both switches. System Settings > Notifications > Allow notifications from iPhone, then Allow Live Activities from iPhone inside it. The inner one is easy to miss.
3. Set up iPhone Mirroring itself. The relay only starts once mirroring has been set up and paired. Open the iPhone Mirroring app on the Mac and complete it once; the menu bar behaviour follows from that setup, not from keeping a window open.
4. Confirm the floors. macOS 26 on the Mac, iOS 18 or later on the phone, a passcode on the phone, Apple silicon or T2 on the Mac.
5. Same Apple Account, two-factor on. A second account signed in on one device is a common cause on work machines.
6. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on, phone nearby. Both radios, both devices. A phone left in another room is enough to break it.
7. Make sure an activity is actually running. Start a timer on the iPhone. It is the cheapest test there is, it takes five seconds, and it separates a broken relay from an app that simply has nothing live to report.
8. Make room in the menu bar. If the activity is present but reduced to an unreadable glyph, this is the fix rather than a bug.

One thing worth knowing before you go looking for it: not every app supports Live Activities on iPhone in the first place. The Mac shows what the phone is running, so an app that never adopted the feature on iOS has nothing to relay, and there is no Mac-side setting that changes that.

#Why no Mac app can start one

Live Activities are created through ActivityKit, and the availability badge on that framework is the clearest statement of what macOS 26 did and did not get. The Activity class is documented as iOS 16.1 and later, and iPadOS 16.1 and later. There is no macOS row.

The practical effect is easy to picture. A long build, a video export, a large upload, a backup that takes an hour: all of them are exactly the kind of work Live Activities were designed for, all of them happen on the Mac, and none of them can put anything in that menu bar slot. Meanwhile iPadOS 26 did get a version of the idea for its own work, using Live Activities to report the progress of intensive background tasks. macOS 26 got the relay instead.

This also explains a small confusion in Apple’s own documentation, where ActivityKit is described as sharing live updates on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and the Mac. The Mac is in the list as a display surface. It is not in the list as a place an app can create one.

#What a Mac app can put there instead

The gap is old enough to have its own category of software. Third-party status apps read Mac-side sources directly, with no relay and no phone involved: the now-playing track, the next calendar event, a connecting Bluetooth device, the volume and brightness levels, a timer. None of it goes through ActivityKit, which is why it works on a Mac with no iPhone paired to it at all, and equally why it never shows an Uber Eats order.

NotchBay is this site’s own app in that category, so weigh the description accordingly. It draws its activities around the notch rather than in the menu bar: now playing with a waveform and media controls, the next calendar event with one-click join, AirPods and Bluetooth battery on connect, the volume and brightness HUD redrawn at the notch instead of Apple’s overlay, a focus timer, and weather for a chosen city. It also carries Zoom and Google Meet call controls, on-device dictation through Apple’s SpeechAnalyzer, and a clipboard tray of the last 60 clips sorted by type, with screenshots OCR’d so their text is searchable. Clipboard history on Mac covers what macOS itself keeps, which is one item.

Its limits are the ones worth knowing before downloading anything: macOS 26 or later and nothing earlier, designed for a MacBook with a notch (Pro from 2021, Air from the M2 generation), with a small floating pill at the top edge as the fallback on a Mac without a cutout or on an external display. Call controls need the Accessibility permission, the Google Meet bridge works through Chromium browsers and not Safari, message mirroring and the Focus chip need Full Disk Access, and the tray holds 60 clips plus pinned ones rather than an unlimited archive. It is $9 one-time, signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, and it is not on the Mac App Store.

The two things are complements, not substitutes. Apple’s relay is the only route to iPhone activities on a Mac, and no third-party app can reproduce it. A Mac-side app is the only route to Mac status, and Apple ships nothing for it.

#Questions people ask

#What this means for the notch

Apple put the relay in the menu bar, which on a notched MacBook is the strip the camera housing already cuts in half. The more items live up there, the sooner a Live Activity gives up on a compact view and shrinks to a glyph, so this feature and your existing status icons are now spending the same budget. It also leaves the Mac’s own long-running work unrepresented, and that is a gap Apple has given developers no API to close. Notch apps have been filling it from Mac-side sources since before Tahoe. Two different jobs, one strip of screen, competing for it.