Apple’s new hands-free unlocking feature doesn’t work with existing smart locks

Last week, Apple announced that it is bringing hands-free unlocking for smart locks to Apple Home when iOS 18 arrives this fall. The new feature takes advantage of the U1 ultra-wideband (UWB) chip in many iPhones and Apple Watches to allow a smart lock to automatically open when you approach your front door – no touch required.

But hands-free unlocking isn’t coming to your existing Home Key smart lock because no current lock has the hardware to support it. To use this cool new feature, you’ll have to buy a new lock, and we probably won’t see any UWB-enabled smart locks until the end of 2024 at the earliest.

The new capacity is part Home key – a feature of the Apple Home smart home platform that lets you unlock compatible locks by tapping them with your iPhone or Apple Watch. With hands-free unlocking, you won’t need to take out your phone or touch your watch to the lock to open it; Instead, if you are wearing your watch or your phone is in your pocket and has been unlocked by you in the last 24 hours, the door will unlock when you are two meters away and approaching from the outside.

A smart lock can work with both Home key unlock options or just one, but as mentioned, it could be a while before we see any locks that support the new feature.

I spoke to several smart lock manufacturers following Apple’s announcement, and they all confirmed that their existing locks do not support UWB. These include Aqara, U-tec, Yale, August, Level, Lockly, and SwitchBot. (Schlage did not respond.)

Almost universally, the manufacturers I spoke to said they were exploring the possibility of incorporating the technology, but only U-tec said it had a UWB lock on development. Clark Ruan, vice president of U-tec, told me that the next-generation Ultraloq smart lock will support UWB and is estimated to arrive in the fourth quarter of this year.

Hands-free automatic unlocking is not a new concept; Versions of the feature have been available for years. August first developed the ability to unlock your door as you approach in 2013, and today several smart locks have this feature.

Apple Home also lets you set automation to automatically unlock a door using geofencing. But it asks for permission to run the automation on your phone or watch every time, which makes it not hands-free and, frankly, a bit annoying. In my experience, neither solution – August’s auto-unlock technology nor Apple’s geofencing – is all that reliable.

What’s new about Apple’s UWB unlocking implementation is the technology. Instead of using the combination of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Wi-Fi, GPS, and a third-party app that most other solutions dothe feature uses UWB and BLE.

It’s the same technology we’ve seen implemented for digital car keys, like BMW’s Digital Key Plus, which uses UWB to know when you’re near the car and automatically unlock it. With a UWB compatible smart lock, your phone/watch can communicate with it directly, without having to jump through hoops to check its location before unlocking the door. In theory, this should provide a more reliable, secure, and faster auto-unlock experience.

UWB is a short-range wireless communication protocol that operates at very high frequencies. It can provide secure, accurate, real-time location data without requiring line of sight – making it ideal for this type of use case.

According to Sujata Neidig, Chief Marketing Officer at NXP, which manufactures UWB chips, the technology provides accurate distance and angle measurements without line of sight. Which means it’s accurate enough to know whether you’re inside the house, approaching the door so it doesn’t unlock, outside, approaching the door to unlock it, or moving away from the door from the outside so it can lock when you leave.

For the car lock technology that NXP worked on, Neidig said the auto-unlock feature uses BLE for the initial connection between the car and the phone and then switches to UWB for precise unlocking to know which side to unlock first. She said a similar implementation could be used for a smart home door lock. The BLE radio is necessary because, according to Neidig, UWB has high power consumption. When initially using BLE to establish a connection, the UWB radio can be turned off longer, reducing power consumption.

While UWB’s higher power usage isn’t good news for smart locks, which already struggle with battery life, the use cases for UWB in the smart home are exciting. I’d expect to see Apple do more with its U1 chip, which also made its way into the HomePod Mini and second-generation HomePod.

Before this new auto-unlock feature for homes, Apple used UWB for things like transferring music, finding an AirTag, and unlocking your car. But there is potential for advanced smart home automations. With such precise location data, a HomePod can turn on bedroom lights when you walk from the living room to the bedroom, and then turn them on in the living room when you walk in the other direction. That would be really cool.

Hands-free unlocking for smart home locks will likely extend beyond Apple Home. Aliro, a universal standard for smart locks that Apple is helping to develop, plans to include UWB, along with BLE and NFC (which Apple uses for its Home Key tap-to-unlock technology), in its first specification.

While Aliro is in its early stages, considering most high-end Android phones also support UWB, we could very well see this hands-free unlocking feature coming to more smart home platforms if the smart lock industry finally adopts it. Unlike Apple’s Home Key feature, hands-free unlocking with UWB will not require specific HomeKit certification; If the lock is Matter certified and has the necessary hardware, it will work with Apple Home hands-free unlocking.

So while it looks like we’ll have to wait a while for this better, faster auto-unlock feature – and invest in new hardware – there are promising signs here. The very fragmented smart home industry is starting to coalesce around exciting new technologies that have the potential to make our homes significantly smarter.