Apple is bringing Live Activities to the Mac this fall as part of macOS Tahoe 26, and here’s a helpful compatibility tidbit: your iPhone doesn’t need to be running iOS 26 to make it work.
According to Apple’s WWDC25 session “What’s new in widgets,” Live Activities from a paired iPhone will show up in the macOS menu bar as long as your phone is on iOS 18 or later. No iOS 26 requirement, no extra app updates needed.
How will Mac Live Activities work?
Just like on the iPhone’s Dynamic Island, the Mac will show the reduced version of the Live Activity in the menu bar. Once clicked, it will display the expanded view from the iPhone’s Lock Screen.
Selecting that expanded view will even launch the associated app via iPhone Mirroring, giving you a quick way to jump straight into the native app running on your phone, right from your Mac.
Better still, this works automatically for any existing Live Activity-enabled app you already use, which means no developer code changes are required.
Here’s Apple’s explanation:
Live Activities from a paired iPhone will now appear in macOS Tahoe. Just like in the Dynamic Island on iPhone, my coffee order tracker Live Activity presents the leading and trailing views together in the menu bar. When the Live Activity is selected, the lock screen presentation from iPhone will appear. Clicking on the lock screen presentation will launch the associated app using iPhone Mirroring. Live Activities on macOS can be provided by iPhones running iOS 18 and later. There are no code changes required, and just like iPhone widgets on macOS, they support interaction and deep links.
So if you’re planning to update your Mac to macOS Tahoe 26 but won’t be able to run iOS 26 on your iPhone for some reason, you’ll still be good to go.