iOS Live Activities

I'm working on an app and wanted to setup wallet passes and live activities , initially I was like how hard can this be... we live in the golden age of AI. After lots of back and forth with different LLMs, I'm gonna post my journey here of how to actually do a proper setup using expo-widgets and fastlane on a react native app.

Let's start with wallets, Google Wallet passes specifically;

I used to work for companies that always treated their Android apps as the distant unmentionable cousin... so I thought to myself, I'm not gonna do that, focus on iOS and neglect Android... I'm personally an Apple user but I ended up buying a Pixel to do on device testing since medium simulator is not enough. Why treat Android any less than iOS?

To setup passes like tickets for an event, you need to first signup here for Google Pay and Wallet console and setup a business profile, what if you are pre-paperwork startup? tough luck. Anywho, that was not a problem for me, add the EIN, DUNS, whatever to get this going. Now is done, lets connect to the API... should be easy, right? No. First there is the huge underlying assumption you already did the Google Cloud setup with Service Account setup.. that is a different story.