Put a Singapore bus countdown on your iPhone Lock Screen

The point of a bus app is to stop looking at a bus app. If you have to keep the screen awake and the app open to know when to stand up, you are doing the work the phone should be doing.

On iPhone, the mechanism for this is a Live Activity: a card that lives on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island, updates itself while the app is closed, and disappears when it is no longer relevant.

Here is how to put a bus in one.

Follow a bus

1. Open Whenbus. The stop you are standing at is normally the first card.
2. Tap it to see arrivals.
3. On the service you want, tap the live updates button - the broadcast glyph.

That is the whole flow. The first time you do it, iOS will ask permission to send notifications. Allow it: the countdown is refreshed by push, so declining leaves you with a card that freezes at whatever it knew when you locked the phone.

What you get

The card shows the service number, the stop, and the countdown to the next arrival. Lock the phone and it is on the Lock Screen. Raise the phone with an Always-On display and it stays readable, dimmed. Tap into the Dynamic Island and it expands.

If you have more than one bus running, the Island’s smallest mode shows the service number rather than the time. That mode only exists when several activities are competing for it, and telling them apart is the only useful thing it can say in that space.

Two things worth knowing

It ends on its own. Once the bus has arrived, the activity finishes and clears itself. There is nothing to remember to switch off, and leaving one running does not cost you battery for the rest of the day.

Swiping the banner away does not turn it off. This one catches people. A swipe dismisses the card from the Lock Screen; the updates keep running. If you want it back, open Whenbus and go to the Live screen, which lists everything currently running and is the only place a dismissed activity can be recovered.

When the countdown stops moving

Almost always notifications. Check Settings → Whenbus → Notifications on your iPhone and make sure they are allowed.

If notifications are on and it still froze, the Live screen inside the app shows the status in words - how long ago the last update landed, and whether the activity has ended - and offers Restart on the ones that have finished.

Occasionally iOS ends a Live Activity earlier than expected, particularly under Low Power Mode. That is the system reclaiming resources rather than a fault in the app, and Restart brings it back.