I really like this lock. To start, I will say that I bought this lock with my own money and have not been asked by anyone to write this review. I was a fairly early adopter of smart locks having preordered the first generation Kevo when it was announced. I’ve had the original Kevo and then the Kevo second gen when it came out. I was convinced Kevo was the best option out there for now despite it being somewhat unreliable. When it came time to put a lock on my garage, I was about to put another Kevo on that door as well but decided to give the Yale Assure a try. I put the old Kevo on my garage and the new Assure on my home’s front door to see if it would give us a better experience than we had with the Kevo. Although it is not as mindless to operate as touching the lock with your finger to lock or unlock it like you do with the Kevo, the Assure ended up being far better in my opinion. Locking is just as easy as the Kevo since you simply touch the keypad with the back of a few fingers and it locks. Unlike the Kevo, the Assure locks immediately and 100% of the time with a single touch whereas the Kevo was maybe 80% on the first touch and took a few seconds to process the request. The Kevo became frustrating when you’d touch it, wait a few seconds, and find that it didn’t respond so you had to try again. As far as unlocking, the Kevo again was very simple as it only takes a touch of the lock with a finger, hand, elbow, or whatever is available when you’re carrying bags of groceries into the house but again, it was only about 80% on the first try and the rest of the time took an extra tap and another 2-3 seconds to respond and unlock. The Assure on the other hand can be unlocked by typing in the user set passcode, asking Siri to unlock it, or quickly getting to HomeKit through the iPhone control center and tapping unlock. Since I keep my phone in a cell phone holder on my car’s dash when driving, I find it very easy to tap unlock or ask Siri to unlock the front door as I’m pulling up to my house and then it’s already unlocked by the time I get to the door. Unlike with the Kevo, I no longer have to stand at my door tapping it the lock once, twice, or even three times to get it to open sometimes. I, by the way, am not trying to put down Kevo, I owned one for several years and still feel that it is one of the best options currently available, just not the best for me any longer. And for those familiar with Kevo, yes, I have done calibrations, installed software updates, kept my phone (or the fob) in a consistent location in my front pocket, uninstalled and reinstalled the software/app and lock within the app, etc... to troubleshoot. My wife actually just gave up on it at times in favor of using her key. For anyone that wants a physical key for grandma, they Kevo is a good option. Another situation where Kevo would win over the Assure is in the case where you only have one door; the Assure doesn’t have a key hoe so if the battery dies, you have to run to the store to buy a 9V battery to touch to the bottom of it to get inside. If your Assure is your only door lock and the electronics in it fail, you’d have no way to get inside other than breaking a window. If you have HomeKit and have a second door to your house with a physical key lock as a backup, the Assure is a really good option. I still have the Kevo and just put it on my garage which I don’t access as often as my front door but after using the Assure for a few months now, I’m considering putting an Assure on the garage as well and just using the Kevo for another side door. I suppose I should mention August briefly as well. I almost bought an August instead of the Assure when I was looking for something to replace my Kevo but when I saw the physical size of it in person at a local electronics store, not just looking at photos online, I was turned off by the enormity of it. August seems like a cool lock with great options and functionality but I just couldn’t bring myself to put something that size on my front door. If August wants to send me one, I’d put it on my door and give it a try I suppose but for now, the Assure is the lock for me; I have zero complaints about it to date and couldn’t ask for more. Hard to believe as I can most often list out several pros and cons to just about any device.
