lol "probably just use a key."
Sounds to obvious and reasonable.
Kevo app shutdown
51–60 of 122 posts
Re: Kevo app shutdown
#52I never understood the smart lock. Some other connected appliances make sense - HVAC for example. But unlocking my door with a key is such a trivially easy, failure-proof thing to do, and every smart lock I've ever seen so riddled with failure modes, that it boggles my mind anyone would go through the cost and effort to install.
AirBnB rentals are common (but annoying) applications for these.
Re: Kevo app shutdown
#53buy stupid devices win stupid prizes
Re: Kevo app shutdown
#542 months notice is very short, especially considering some of these will have been deployed for a decade... A year or so would have been expected. Some of these will have their owners on the other side of the world with no way to get back in time. Keep this in mind next time you consider depending on Assa Abloy - bummer to see them lose their ways.
If you don't have the physical key available to you outside your house, you failed to have a backup option for the inevitable failure of the electronics.
I definitely agree with the spirit of this, but I also know a lot of non technical people who aren't as paranoid about things like this as I am (we have a keypad lock, backup keys in mounted lockboxes along with a 9v battery to power the keypad if need be), and they just expect that paying for something fairly critical like a door lock means it will either work normally, or give an indication that stuff might go sideways soon ("low battery! Replace or be locked out", for example).
I suspect stories like "I left my house without my keys on the day they shut it down to go for a walk and couldn't get back into my home." Or "I somehow locked my keys in my car, including the backup house key. Luckily my backup car key is in the house." Only to realize the lock isn't working normally and there are 100 emails warning them about this in their "updates" tab.. buried under a mountain of spam.
There will definitely be people who wind up stuck with this, especially with such short notice, and it won't necessarily be because they didn't plan. Now I'm going to go double check my lockbox.
Re: Kevo app shutdown
#55I never understood the smart lock. Some other connected appliances make sense - HVAC for example. But unlocking my door with a key is such a trivially easy, failure-proof thing to do, and every smart lock I've ever seen so riddled with failure modes, that it boggles my mind anyone would go through the cost and effort to install.
I love walking up to my front door and having it automatically unlock when I’m carrying groceries.
It’s also really nice to just leave the house and have it lock automatically behind me.
But I didn’t fall for cloud bullshit. It’s purely local and z-wave.
Re: Kevo app shutdown
#56This annoys me greatly. When I built my house I went full home automation. At the time I was telling my friends about how important it was not to have cloud dependancy, and how I was doing everything local. I use KNX as the main backbone and Home Assistant for control. And everything was local with the one exception of my Kevo door lock. At the time I built, there just wasn’t a perfect local only solution. I hadn’t p…
My Schlage uses a numeric entry and has no connectivity whatsoever. I love everything about it.
Re: Kevo app shutdown
#57I honestly think mandatory local support for HomeKit standard is one of the best designs. I lost internet despite having power due to a city wide outage. Having HomeKit still work for smart lights and outlet + home assistant was awesome. Pretty much anything HomeKit supported will last “perpetually” for its smart features.
Also Matter/Thread, which is effectively the successor to platform-specific protocols like Homekit for local-only stuff.
Re: Kevo app shutdown
#58This annoys me greatly. When I built my house I went full home automation. At the time I was telling my friends about how important it was not to have cloud dependancy, and how I was doing everything local. I use KNX as the main backbone and Home Assistant for control. And everything was local with the one exception of my Kevo door lock. At the time I built, there just wasn’t a perfect local only solution. I hadn’t p…
Maybe cut the wires from the current circuit board(s) and throw in a ESP32 with wifi and bluetooth and driver board for the servos.
My house lock is probably the one place where I'm not prepared to compromise security with a DIY solution. Not talking about the software security (in fact open source solutions are probably more secure) but literally the hardware and build quality of any DIY work.
Re: Kevo app shutdown
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t buy anything from Assa Abloy, local or not.
As someone living in a country where Abloy locks are used everywhere, I’m interested to hear what’s wrong with them
One of their digital lock designs had a rather cough Pleasing vulnerability. But other than that it's vendor lock-in (heh), and lack of availability in the US.
With most so called locksmiths being drillsmiths in the US, not being able to clone DD and dimple keys.
Puck one. Or maybe the OP is just bitter they can't pick it for their next "belt" after getting chuffed with themselves picking average american garbage.
Re: Kevo app shutdown
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's worse than that - those locks are bluetooth-based, so they don't care about the cloud. What happened is that they are disabling the app, so it is no longer usable.
Apps require constant maintenance. If you just leave an app in Play Store or App Store and don’t touch it for a while, in couple of years it will be gone. Compliance requirements, obsolete APIs, forceful upgrades by the Apple/Google all see to that. That means you need to keep the app project updated and all dependencies in reasonable form. It’s not outlandish if you are a big company but as someone who oversaw the d…
just yet another example of dying companies could be heroes by releasing their code to the public