Review: August Smart Lock

Early Americans would risk it all to cross this country, often losing family members to violence, disease, or exposure in the process. And when they arrived in the West, some would secure what little they had left with a lock and key.

That’s basically the same technology you would use to get into your home after a 5-hour cross-country jaunt today. But during your trip you might have reclined in a leather seat (or not—no judgments here), watched satellite TV, paid for a meal with a credit card, and connected your tablet to the global hive-mind internet to send a picture of the “service dog” sitting fully upright in 21C.

You literally flew across a continent in a manner those pioneers would have hailed as magic 200 years ago, maybe drove home in a horseless carriage powered by lightning, and then opened your door with a “technology” that has been around since ancient Assyria.

Keys are unacceptable in 2014; this is the problem August means to solve. It’s a lock for people who are awakened to the truth that keys are antiquated pieces of metal stupidity.

The premise of the thing is simple: It uses your smartphone to unlock your door. It’s not the first so-called smart lock; Kevo, a Shark Tank-winning system came before. And there have been myriad other attempts, from numeric keypads to fingerprint sensors, that are far smarter than the dumb old key. But August is the most ambitious take so far.

It pairs with your iPhone or Android device over Bluetooth, and allows you to use a touchscreen instead of dumb-ass metal shard: Tap the screen, the door unlocks. On the iPhone, which currently affords app makers more access to the Bluetooth Low Energy radio, August can automatically unlock the door just as you’re reaching for the handle. The system allows you to give access to visitors on a temporary or recurring basis, and it will automatically lock the door behind you.

Installation is largely brain-free experience for anyone who has a common deadbolt (the only type of lock for which August is available at launch) and a screwdriver:

• You take the two screws out of your thumbturn—that thing that you twist to lock or unlock.
• You screw a mounting plate onto your deadbolt and slide an adapter onto that rod that pokes out the middle.
• You slide on the lovely, Yves Behar-designed (he co-founded the company) knurled nob and close the clips.
• You're done; stop looking for complexity in an often simple world.

I followed the included instructions, coded in bright, simple colors reminiscent of a seatback safety card. I had to slow way down for our photographer to take pictures, otherwise it would have taken me about five minutes. According to August, the system is compatible with 85 percent of deadbolts, and you can call them for help with most of the rest.

I lost my keys 15 minutes later, and was able to use my phone to get back into the house.

When this system works, it is sorcery.

Unfortunately, it does not always work perfectly. And when you’re talking about something that secures access to your most sacred place, the penalty for failure is incredibly high.

Since installing August a couple weeks ago, I’ve started putting the chain on my door a lot more. It’s not that my neighborhood is in the middle of a crime wave or anything, it’s just that one day I came home and found my door unlocked. I knew the door locked behind me because I had just installed August, and the chime-accompanied “Everlock” function, which closes the deadbolt after 60 seconds, was still something that made me giggle.

A few hours earlier, I had stood outside the door and waited for the sound. When I came back to grab something, I cursed, realizing that I didn’t have my phone with me and would have to use my ancient key like a bum. Only I didn’t—because the door was unlocked. I was horrified, and spent a half-hour searching the place for signs of forced entry or missing items.

Fortunately nothing was amiss, but I haven’t been able to get to sleep without securing the chain since then. I get freaked out at the prospect of someone walking through my unlocked door and standing over my wife and me while we sleep.

I asked the crew at August about this, and they didn’t have an answer. They said it wasn't something anyone else had ever experienced during their testing. It is entirely possible that I hallucinated or screwed something up. Or maybe it was the lock. Because I had the thing before it was released, I was using a beta build of the software. iOS 8 had also just come out, and it really messed with the app; apparently it made big changes to the way Bluetooth LE worked, and August was developed and tested primarily on older versions of iOS. The company has since released a major update, and I haven’t found the door inexplicably unlocked since.

Another iOS 8 casualty was the Auto-Unlock function. This is by far August’s most impressive feature, and, when it works, it genuinely makes you feel like you’re living in the future. The device works with your location-aware phone to set up a geofence: It registers when you cross out of a 100-yard radius of your lock, and then when you come back into that circle. That series of events triggers August to unlock itself when you get close. You walk up to the door just as you hear it unlock. It is amazingly superdope. It is The Jetsons. It is unreliable. It only worked once for me on the initial release of Apple's new operating system, and even though both iOS and August have updated, it is still just OK.

Even with the latest version of iOS 8 and the latest version of the app, Auto-Unlock only auto-unlocks about 80 percent of the time. That’s a hell of a batting average in baseball, but it’s not enough in the rely-on-me game. It’s good enough that you expect it to work. Then, when it doesn’t, you have to get out your phone, fire up the app, wait for it to connect to your lock (an agonizing two-ish seconds), and tap the red circle. Guess what’s quicker: using a key.

That leaves me with a weird feeling about August. I love the thing when it works, but I don’t fully trust it. I wouldn't leave the house without keys if someone weren't going to be home when I returned, and I'll probably yank out the thing's batteries the next time my wife and I go on an extended trip. Since August retains your deadbolt's key, we can just get back in the old-school way.

This lack of trust is a huge problem, even if it’s just a niggling worry in the back of my brain. This product only works if it always works; if it clears that bar, you can see entire industries—from hospitality to security to the sharing economy—changed by the innovation. But if August fails even one time out of a hundred, it won’t measure up to its very stiff competition: the key, which, while annoyingly ancient, has had millennia to evolve into a technology that none of us have any trouble trusting completely.