For years, there has been one specific slice of the iOS experience that felt genuinely superior to the Android equivalent: Live Activities. It is not a revolutionary feature, but it is a masterclass in glanceable design. The way a real-time update—whether it is a sports score or a ride-share arrival—simply sits in the “pill” at the top of the screen, updating without requiring a single swipe, creates a friction-less interaction that feels both modern and intuitive.
As a primary Android user who keeps a secondary iPhone for testing, I have spent a significant amount of time feeling a quiet sense of feature envy. The “pill” experience reduces the cognitive load of managing an active task; you don’t have to leave your current app or pull down a notification shade to see the status of something. You just look up.
After experimenting with various third-party attempts to replicate this on Google’s platform, I finally found a solution that bridges the gap. By installing an open-source tool called LiveMedia, I have managed to bring a functional version of iPhone Live Activities for Android to my Google Pixel 10 Pro. Although it is not a perfect mirror of the Apple experience, it is a significant upgrade to the way I interact with my device.
Streamlining the media experience
LiveMedia focuses specifically on the audio and video side of the “live” experience. Once configured, the app pushes your current media activity—be it a podcast, a playlist, or a video—directly into the notification pill at the top of the screen. For someone who uses YouTube Music throughout the day, the difference in efficiency is immediate.
The standard Android workflow for skipping a track usually involves three or four distinct steps: pulling down the notification shade, locating the media card, tapping the skip button, and then swiping the shade back up. It is a process that takes a few seconds and breaks the flow of whatever else you are doing. LiveMedia eliminates that redundancy by placing the essential controls—play, pause, and skip—right at the top of the screen. A single tap is all it takes to change the song, and the app automatically hides itself on the lock screen to avoid clashing with the system’s default media player.
The app is currently optimized for Android 16 and is particularly tailored for the Pixel series. It works across a wide array of popular services, including Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and the main YouTube app.
The developer’s touch: Customization and control
Coming from a software engineering background, I appreciate when a tool doesn’t just provide a feature, but allows the user to tweak how that feature behaves. LiveMedia is surprisingly flexible in this regard. Rather than forcing a rigid layout, it offers a suite of customization options that allow you to decide exactly what information is surfaced in the pill.
Users can toggle the visibility of album art, artist names, album titles, action buttons, and progress bars. You can even choose whether to show the timestamp or the name of the app providing the media. This level of granularity allows the interface to feel like a native part of the OS rather than a bolted-on third-party utility.
The trade-offs: Privacy and polish
No third-party workaround is without its caveats. The most significant hurdle for some users will be the permission requirements. To function, LiveMedia requires “notification access.” This allows the app to read your system notifications to identify what is playing and then mirror those controls in the pill. For privacy-conscious users, granting an app the ability to read notifications can feel intrusive, though it is a technical necessity for this specific implementation.
There are also some lingering “rough edges” in the user experience. Most notably, the app lacks a scrubbing feature. On an iPhone, you can often interact with the Live Activity to move forward or backward in a track. In LiveMedia, attempting to swipe the progress bar often results in the entire activity being swiped away, which can be frustrating when you are trying to uncover a specific moment in a song.
while it excels at media, it does not yet match the breadth of iOS Live Activities. Apple’s system handles everything from Uber ride tracking to flight updates and food delivery. LiveMedia is strictly a media tool, as Android’s current system-level limitations prevent third-party apps from fully customizing notification layouts for non-media tasks.
| Feature | iOS Live Activities | LiveMedia (Android) |
|---|---|---|
| Media Controls | Native/Integrated | Third-party/Pill-based |
| App Scope | Media, Rides, Delivery, Sports | Strictly Media/Audio |
| Customization | Developer-defined | User-defined (High) |
| Permissions | Standard API | Notification Access Required |
| Scrubbing | Supported in many apps | Not currently supported |
The impact of glanceable UI
Despite the lack of scrubbing and the privacy trade-offs, LiveMedia fills a gap in the Android experience that I didn’t realize was so glaring until I found a way to fix it. It changes the fundamental rhythm of how I use my phone. By moving the most frequent actions to the most visible part of the screen, it reduces the number of times I have to “dive” into the OS to perform a simple task.
What we have is the essence of good UI: removing the steps between the user’s intent and the result. Even as an experimental, open-source project available via GitHub, LiveMedia provides a glimpse of how Android could feel if it leaned more heavily into this kind of persistent, glanceable interaction.
The next evolution for this kind of experience likely lies in deeper system integration from Google itself. Until then, for Pixel users on the latest software, this “pill” is a small but powerful addition to the daily workflow. Once you get used to having your controls just a glance away, going back to the traditional notification shade feels like a step backward.
Do you use a secondary device to test features, or have you found other ways to customize your Android UI? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
