With a new live activity in iOS 17.4, you can pause your stopwatch, reset it or start a new lap right from your iPhone’s Lock Screen or Dynamic Island.
UPDATE: Apple has removed the stopwatch live activity. The feature won’t be available when iOS 17.4 releases to the public, but may return in a future update. The original article continues below.
Like other live activities, the new Stopwatch live activity in iOS 17.4 also shows up in the Dynamic Island. Just open the Clock app, select the Stopwatch tab, hit the Start button to start the stopwatch and then exit to the Home Screen for the live activity control to appear in the Dynamic Island
Press and hold the stopwatch live activity on the Lock Screen or Dynamic Island to reveal controls to pause the stopwatch and start a new lap. To reset the stopwatch, swipe on the live activity or hit the X button in the Dynamic Island control.
iOS 17.4 introduces a live activity for the stopwatch
MacRumors discovered this feature in the first beta of iOS 17.4. Adding live activity support to the stopwatch will “prevent users from activating the timer and then forgetting about it,” the publication remarked.
“The Dynamic Island shows a small to-the-second timer and the Lock Screen shows the full stopwatch timer when the screen is being looked at,” it explained.
The new feature was absent from the iOS 17.4 beta at the time of this writing. Whether it will launch alongside iOS 17.4 remains to be seen, but we’ll soon know the answer as iOS 17.4 is scheduled to be released to the public in March.
The update will bring new emoji and CarPlay apps, SharePlay for music on your HomePod and Apple TV, transcripts of shows on Apple Podcasts, Siri message playback in multiple languages, Apple Cash virtual card numbers and more.
Other Clock app improvements in iOS 17.4
iOS and iPadOS 17.0 and macOS Sonoma 14.0 brought several new actions to the Clock app, including Start Stopwatch, Lap Stopwatch, Stop the Stopwatch, Reset Stopwatch, Get Current Timer, Pause Timer, Resume Timer and Cancel Timer.
The Set Timer action was updated to allow people to start a new timer in their automations even if there’s already one running.
The updates also brought support for running multiple timers at once, the ability to label timers to help distinguish them from one another, presets for new timers, a list of recent timers and the Digital Clock widget for your Home and Lock Screens.