In the new iOS 16.1 update, Apple released Live Activities features for users to view apps’ updates on the Lock Screens and Dynamic Island (only on iPhone 14 Pro) in real-time.
Taking advantage of the feature’s release right before the Brazilian Presidential elections, developers Felipe Ribeiro and Willian Max from Sorcererhat developed an app “Apuração Dinâmica” for iOS 16 users to view the vote count for the election in real-time on their Lock Screen and Dynamic Island.
Brazilian has an electronic voting system in which data from the ballot boxes is sent to a “supercomputer” securely and directly. Located at the headquarter of the Electoral Court, the supercomputer counts millions of votes within hours.
The Electoral Court also provides an official API for third parties to have access to the vote count data in real-time which was used by the Brazilian developers for “Apuração Dinâmica” (Dynamic Counting).
Check out Here are the apps that support Live Activities on Lock Screen and Dynamic Island here.
Brazilian elections unlocked iOS 16 Live Activities versatility
Ribeiro and Max told 9to5Mac that they released the app as an experimental tool through the Apple TestFlight app for interested users to try it out because the feature has not been available long enough for them to run tests and release the app through App Store.
📢 Pessoal que tem interesse em acompanhar a apuração das #Eleições2022 hoje em tempo real: desenvolvemos um pequeno app na Sorcererhat Labs que está disponível somente via TestFlight (iOS).
Quem quiser participar pode baixar o app aqui: https://t.co/0piNI7z3RE
(Continua… 🧵) pic.twitter.com/Hy4sd0tx4A
— Sorcererhat Labs (@SorcererhatLabs) October 30, 2022
But luckily for them, when the counting began, the results started to show on their app’s Live Activity and the users’ reaction was very positive. They said:
The reception of the app was incredible, much greater than we anticipated, and we were happy to see it being shared on social networks by voters who were anxious about the election results.
We are proud to have been part of this historic moment for Brazil and for the opportunity to demonstrate how Live Activities and Dynamic Island are powerful tools when used in ways that really contribute to the user experience.
However, they also shared that it was challenging to get around the technical limitations of the frequency of Live Activities updates because vote count data was being extracted from Electoral Court’s API, not its own server.
In iOS 16.2 beta 1, a new option “Live Activities updated more frequently” is found which will update information in shorted time than one minute.
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