Imagine walking up to your front door and it unlocks — even opens — automatically as you approach. It may sound like the stuff of smart home dreams, but it could soon be a reality, thanks to ultra-wideband (UWB) technology arriving on smart locks.
With its precise, real-time location capabilities, UWB enables a smart lock to react to the presence of your phone or smartwatch as you approach your door, unlocking it with no intervention on your part. Both the lock and your device need a UWB chip, but this touchless experience means there’s no need to pull out your phone, fiddle with keycodes, fingerprints, or, god forbid, an actual key.
I got to demo the first locks to support the wireless communication protocol at CES last month, and I am ready for my hands-free smart lock future.
Fast, easy, and frictionless, hands-free unlocking is the kind of convenience the smart home needs
I test a lot of smart door locks and haven’t used a house key in a decade. But unlocking my front door still isn’t a frictionless experience: fingerprint readers are fast but can be finicky, Home Key is smooth but limited to Apple devices, keycodes slow me down, and palm readers and facial scanning still feel like overkill.
Turning a device that’s almost always on me, such as my phone or watch, into a key that can “magically” tell my door it’s me, without my having to lift a finger or stare awkwardly into a camera, feels as frictionless as it can get.
Apple and Samsung appear to agree with me; both are adding support for UWB unlocking at the OS level for their smartphones and watches. Apple introduced it with iOS 18, and Samsung says its wallet feature will support Digital Home Keys using NFC and UWB later this year. Both companies also plan to support the upcoming Aliro standard that will provide a secure handshake between the lock and your phone (more on Aliro shortly).
This is a good sign that this technology is set to go mainstream. All we need now are some smart locks that work with it.
At CES, I tried out two UWB-powered locks, the Ultraloq Bolt Mission and the Schlage Sense Pro. Even in the RF hell that is the show floor, both unlocked automatically as I approached. Carrying a phone in my hand in one instance and in a bag in another, the locks responded a few seconds before I arrived at them, which, in the real world, would make it simple to then turn the handle and walk in.
How far away I was from the lock when each unlocked was down to how the manufacturer implements the UWB technology. For the Ultraloq demo, the Bolt Mission activated at one meter (about three feet). The Schlage Sense Pro responded to my velocity, opening based on how quickly I approached.
The company says this is due to its proprietary algorithm, Schlage Converge, which unlocks the door at the right moment based on your velocity – i.e., whether you’re running (which I wasn’t able to do in a Venetian hotel suite) or ambling up to the door.
Both locks have alternative methods for unlocking, supporting NFC for tap-to-unlock with your phone or watch, Matter for integration with smart home platforms, and, of course, there’s an app for controlling the lock. The Ultraloq also has a physical keypad and a keyway, and the Schlage has a touchscreen keypad but no keyway.
The crucial difference with UWB compared to all the other unlocking solutions is that you don’t have to wait a beat or two at the door for it to unlock. Fast, easy, and frictionless, hands-free auto-unlocking is the kind of convenience the smart home needs. Effectively, it’s your home responding to you. And while it’s not technically hands-free — you still have to turn the doorknob — the future where your door unlocks and opens may be here sooner than you’d think.
It knows exactly where you are
Currently used in digital car keys and Apple products, including AirTags and AirPods, UWB is a radar-based technology that can accurately locate devices down to a few centimeters. Using active ranging between two UWB radios — for example, a lock and your smartphone — it sends wideband radio waves over high frequencies to identify the position and angle of approach of a device in real time.
When you’re carrying your compatible phone or wearing a compatible smartwatch in range of a UWB smart lock, the lock will first connect to the device over Bluetooth, then activate its UWB radio to identify your precise position and your angle and direction of approach.
This precise proximity unlocking means the lock should only unlock as you walk toward the door from the outside, not as you’re walking away, not if you pause before you get to the door, and not if you’re approaching from the inside. Similarly, if you’re crossing back and forth while, say, mowing the lawn or playing soccer in your front yard, the lock should stay locked. This is a significant improvement over existing auto-unlocking technologies.
“UWB gives us that precision within literally inches of the door. We think that delivers a more secure hands-free unlock experience.”
Auto-unlocking is not a new concept for smart locks — it was a flagship feature of August smart locks when they launched in 2013 and has since been used by several other manufacturers. However, these implementations use a trifecta of radios (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS) combined with an app that needs to be running in the background on your phone to determine your location.
In my experience, the existing hands-free auto-unlocking is spotty and frustrating to use, and I don’t recommend relying on it. I’ve tested it on several locks from different manufacturers and found that it will sometimes activate when I’ve been standing at my door for a few seconds, sometimes fail completely, and at other times, attempt to unlock after I’ve walked into the house. Rarely does it unlock as I approach.
As a local radio-to-radio communication, UWB promises to be faster, more secure, and crucially more accurate. “There’s a lot of variability when you’re using Bluetooth signal strength to auto unlock the lock. You could, in one setting, be three feet away, and it will unlock or you could be 10 feet away,” Tim Eskew, director of residential electronic products at Schlage, told me. “There’s too much variability from our perspective in that solution, whether that’s Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or geofencing with GPS.”
Because of these flaws, Schlage is one of the few smart lock companies that hasn’t implemented an auto-unlock feature on its smart locks — until now. “UWB gives us that precision within literally inches of the door. We think that delivers a more secure hands-free unlock experience,” he says.
Of course, I won’t know for sure how accurate it is until I get to test these locks in the real world, but the companies I’ve spoken to about the tech seem confident that its speed and accuracy are game-changers.
The downside of UWB technology is that you need a phone or watch with a UWB chip built in, along with a smart lock that supports it. While there are several of the former, there are very few of the latter. In fact, only three have been announced, and you can’t buy any yet.
When they do go on sale, they’re going to be expensive. So far, the cheapest is the Lockly Secure Pro UWB Duet Series at $380, which was announced at CES and is slated to arrive in Q4 of this year. The Ultraloq Bolt Mission UWB I demoed, which the company says will ship this quarter, costs $400. The Schlage Sense Pro doesn’t have a price or release date yet — other than this year — but it’s not going to be cheap.
With integration in the operating system of phones and smartwatches, UWB in smart locks will see wider adoption within the next year. This will be driven by a new industry standard called Aliro.
Being developed by Apple, Samsung, and Google, along with major lock and chip manufacturers, Aliro is a communication protocol that enables a secure, local credential exchange between your phone or watch and your smart lock, regardless of manufacturer. The initial spec will support NFC and UWB unlocking, and bring security for your smart lock to the system level of your phone.
However, it’s early days for Aliro, and the spec hasn’t even launched yet. Only Schlage has confirmed that its Sense Pro will support the standard (its parent company, Allegion, is one of the founders of Aliro). Lockly has said its lock will work with Android phones at launch, with support for iOS devices coming later.
Aliro will bring Apple’s Home Key experience to Samsung and Google phones and smartwatches
Ultraloq’s Bolt won’t support Aliro at all, but the company plans to release a lock later this year that will. “We saw an opportunity to deliver an experience that supports Android and iPhone and be the first to market,” Matt Brown of Ultraloq told me. “With these standards still evolving or not quite here yet, our view is we can’t let that slow down innovation.”
The Aliro spec should arrive this year, according to companies I spoke to at CES, and it should be a big step toward turning our phones and watches into secure keys for our homes, no matter who made them. “Assuming that all of the mobile platforms adopt Aliro, it’s going to give a broader choice of either the tap-to-unlock experience or the unlock-on-approach experience,” says Eskew.
Tap-to-unlock is Apple’s Home Key, where you tap your watch or phone on the lock for access. It uses NFC but is currently limited to Apple devices and a handful of locks (Schlage’s Encode Plus being one of the best options). Aliro will standardize tap-to-unlock and bring it to Samsung and Google phones and smartwatches. “We are excited that Aliro will broaden that capability and bring that experience to more users across mobile platforms,” says Eskew.
If you’re not sold on hands-free unlocking or want a backup, tap-to-unlock will be a good option. In fact, initially, Aliro’s main focus is cross-platform NFC support. According to Matt Lovett, director of engineering at Assa Abloy — the world’s largest lock manufacturer and active in developing Aliro — the current way the standard is evolving indicates Aliro will require locks to support NFC, but UWB will be an optional feature.
As the newer, more expensive technology with less existing hardware support, UWB being optional makes sense for the nascent standard. However, bringing support for NFC in smart locks to more phone manufacturers and broadening the adoption of tap-to-unlock will also drive the adoption of UWB. If you find tap-to-unlock super handy, imagine how handy you’ll find not even having to tap.
Ultimately, UWB and NFC work similarly, with both technologies acting as location verification, says Lovett. Aliro then provides the secure credentials, authenticating that this device is authorized to unlock this door. The main difference between the technologies is that UWB removes the physical interaction.
Of course, if you don’t have a device on you, or if you want to give someone else access to your lock, you’ll need a third unlocking option, such as a keypad or NFC tag, fingerprint reader, or yes, maybe even a traditional key.
Hands-free for real … one day
Assa Abloy owns Kwikset, which, along with Schlage, is one of the most popular residential lock brands in the US. At CES, Jeff Sandoval, director of marketing at Assa Abloy, told me that Kwikset is planning to bring a UWB lock to market as the technology matures. They plan to take a slow and steady approach to the new technology, as they did with launching a Matter-over-Thread smart lock.
The fact that two of the largest lock brands in the US are looking to UWB over some of the other solutions we’ve seen in smart locks is a strong signal that this is the future of smart locks. Most interestingly, Sandoval hinted that Kwikset sees “an in-stride unlocking experience” as the ultimate goal — where the door not only unlocks but also opens as you approach.
Smart lock maker Nuki offers a completely hands-free experience in Europe, with GPS-based unlocking on a lock that can control multi-turn latches — so it effectively turns the knob as well as unlocks the lock. While bringing this truly hands-free experience to US deadbolt locks will require a different solution, Sandoval says there are existing technologies that will get us to that “Star Trek moment.” And it all starts with UWB.
