Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsAvoid if you want to use fingerprints or have HomeKit
Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2024
The Yale lock is a perfect example of bad engineering. The lock is beautiful looking, with a very clean design, but has some horrible issues that make it impossible to recommend.
Issue #1 - Yale breaks the whole concept of Apple's Home app with this design. With Apple Home, we often share our Home to family members when they housesit or are staying at our house. All of our 80+ accessories work flawlessly, EXCEPT Yale. This is a problem when unlocking the front door is a critical requirement for housesitting. For these family members, the door lock in the Home app says "SETUP NEEDED". It turns out this is because Yale requires anyone using the Home app to also have the Yale app installed, to personally have enabled Home sharing between Yale & Home apps, and to be a FULL ADMINISTRATOR in the Yale app. The point of the Home app is I can avoid using these third-party apps, and that I can share access without requiring everyone else to install these third-party apps. And, no, I don't want my mother or cousin to be an administrator in Home or Yale, with the ability to remove accessories or change critical settings. This is bad, insecure design and incredibly frustrating.
Issue #2 - Fingerprints. I bought this more expensive model because the idea of a TouchID-like experience for my front door sounds wonderful. However, the setup process is incredibly error-prone, with the lock often flashing red and the app showing an error message when trying to setup fingerprints. Yale's helpful support article suggests you factory reset the lock when you get the error message (thanks!) even though it requires complete re-setup of the entire lock, and even though the error message eventually goes away if you re-attempt a few times per day until it works. Even once fingerprints are registered, for most family members it works less than 50% of the time, and I appear to be the only one who considers using my fingerprint an option. WORST OF ALL, the fingerprints disappear from the lock once every time you change the batteries (which is more often than the advertising suggests), but the app will tell you that they're still registered. So you first have to unregister each fingerprint, and then re-register each fingerprint, multiple times per year! And again, this process will likely take several days to complete, with you entire family frustrated throughout the process and telling you that you wasted hundreds of dollars on a complete piece of crap, and can we please just go back to using a physical key again, it was so much simpler.
Issue #3 – Battery life. Even though we don't use our front door super often, and even though we have strong WiFi signal at the front door, and even though we purchase high quality batteries, the battery life is pitiful, and we have to change them about twice as often as the manual suggests. Rechargeable batteries are not allowed (and will immediately flag a low-battery warning), so this lock is bad for the environment as an energy-hungry device that requires the frequent disposal of AA batteries in a home where we otherwise use 100% rechargeable batteries. But the most annoying part is that this necessitates the fingerprint issue mentioned above.
Issue #4 – Entry code sensitivity. Compared to the prior model of Yale HomeKit lock which we used at our last house, this model is very finicky when it comes to entering the entry codes to unlock the door. I typically have to enter the code 2-3 times to get it to register. This is due in part to two poor design choices: the backlit numbers are dimly backlist, making it a bit hard to see them in direct sunlight; and the sound when tapping in the numbers is very quiet, making it hard to hear when you have tapped successfully on a number. Between these two features, it's quite easy to mis-type the code.
At this point I'm on the lookout for a replacement device. I personally love the idea of not having a keyslot on the front door, but I may have to give up on this preference for the sake of getting a more functional smart deadbolt in a house full of otherwise mostly flawless home accessories.
