Swiggy's Live Activity & Dynamic Island took off from a simple hackathon idea to now having over a million users!

Right after the Apple event, we made a concept design for Live Activity. It was done in a two-day hackathon, and we sent it to Apple as a psd file (that's how they wanted it :p)

Guess what? They featured it on the apple website with the new iPhone 14. We were pumped!

Of course, we faced challenges along the way. We didn't have any free bandwidth in design or engineering, as we were already swamped with our regular work.

We took it upon ourselves to work on the project whenever we could - beyond work hours, on weekends, hackathons, etc.

There wasn't any proper documentation available. And a lot of constraints around what was possible to implement. We had to throw away a lot of good iterations with the map, animations, etc.

With some 3D illustrations (thanks to our visual design team) we were able to establish a visual balance of glanceability and communicating the order status.

The Live Activity widget was going to appear on the lock screen which the users can customise in any way possible. We made sure that it worked on backgrounds with different colors, luminosity, detailing, etc.

It all paid off. To date, more than 3M users have used Live Activities, with close to 15M total live activities recorded. The love we've been getting is truly immense and we're super thrilled!

To be honest it was hard to go above & beyond your regular duties and build something creative just for the love of it. I'm glad that we could pull this off thanks to my amazing teammates.

After this, we built this feature this for other Swiggy products like Instamart and Dineout. Imagine seeing the status of your grocery at a glance, or getting updates about the table you reserved.