Notifications for Live Activities are delayed

Hi everyone,

I have two questions about Live Activity push notifications that we send from our backend server to iPhones.

First, I would like to understand the expected behavior when lowering the APNs priority of a Live Activity update from 10 to 6. How does this affect delivery timing, reliability, or system handling of the notification?

Second, my team has been seeing significant delays with some messages sent to the device. In some cases, notifications take anywhere from 1 to 3 hours to arrive on the phone. We are trying to understand what might cause this kind of delay.

Is this expected under certain conditions, such as device state, system throttling, network conditions, or APNs behavior? Also, is there any way to inspect logs or delivery details for messages sent to the app so we can better diagnose where the delay is happening?

Any guidance would be appreciated. Thanks.

Have you enabled NSSupportsLiveActivitiesFrequentUpdates?

Are you missing the first updates or do you get some then it pauses for awhile? (thinking your backend may not be getting the push token)

Notifications for Live Activities are delayed
 
 
Q