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- Verified Buyer
I bought two of these, one for my entry door and one for the back door. I am on a let's make our home a smart home kick right now. Part of that is I want to eliminate all keys except for my vehicle key fob. And, it is also important for me to use one application to control my home, in my case, I am using Apple Home - therefore to some degree HomeKit compatibility is important. This review is about the the installation, lock itself, the Yale Access App, and HomeKit integration.After looking at a lot of locks I landed on this one, the Yale Assure Lock 2 with Wi-Fi. It looks nice, it is keyless, and it is HomeKit compatible.INSTALLATION: Installation was a breeze for me. I am replacing existing keyed deadbolts. So no need to align a door to a frame. The lock itself easily installed in the existing cutouts. I didn't even need to replace the door frame strike plate as my old one works fine. I found the instructions easy to follow, the lock installation of the physical device/lock took me about 15 minutes, most of that was just making sure I did it per the instructions.THE LOCK: At first my thought was this is a $200+ deadbolt and in my head I was comparing it to a normal deadbolt. This is absolutely the incorrect view. This is a computer that has a physical deadbolt it controls. When thinking like that the $200+ price tag is not all that bad. I would say good value for the money. The only criticisms would be that the physical locking mechanism (thing that turns the deadbolt mechanism to extend it into the door frame) is a simple flimsy piece of metal, versus in normal deadbolts it is typically a non-square type of peg to do that job. I am unsure if this really matters at all though, as long as it does the job it is kind of who cares. Another criticism, which if you think about it, would really be an unfair one, yet important to note, is the size of the interior part of the lock is HUGE (comparatively speaking) - reason for unfair - where would the batteries and computer portion go if it wasn't this big?YALE ACCESS APP: The working of the lock portion is good enough. The set up is horrible. You must watch (or scroll) through the installation instructions for each item, just to be able to set it up, would be much nicer to have a skip. My issue is that on one of them I had to do things more than once, and for my second lock, I knew it all already and just wanted to set it up. C'mon Yale, allow the "Skip".HomeKit INTEGRATION: There have been a lot of negative types of comments on this, which I don't understand because I easily added each lock to HomeKit. Scanning of the HomeKit QR code did not work on either lock, this has been commented on a lot with this reviews. For me, I merely manually entered the device IDs and it worked immediately without issue. Granted, you cannot scan the QR which is easier for sure, but not enough to rank lower.All in all, a great purchase IMO, could use some improvements, but really good just the same. Lock Feature rating is 4 stars due to what I comment on, I just expected better, not sure if better is necessary. Tech support I rated 4 stars, this is not by dealing with a tech support staff, it was the only place to rate the app and the setup issues I discussed.
