Smart locks are the device people most often want and most often buy badly, because the marketing is about unlocking your door from the office and the actual value is somewhere else entirely.
What they are genuinely good for
Households in India run on access. The cleaner comes at ten. The cook comes at six. A relative is staying for a week. Somebody has to let them in, which means either being home, or leaving a key with a neighbour, or getting a duplicate cut and hoping it comes back.
A smart lock replaces all of that with a code. The cook’s code works between six and eight in the morning and at no other time. When the cook changes, the code is deleted — not the lock. You get a log that says the door opened at 6.04, which settles the question of whether someone came, without anyone having to be accused of anything.
Remote unlocking is a nice extra. Code management is the reason to buy one.
Check your door before you look at any product
This is where most purchases go wrong. Measure these four things first.
- Door thickness. Most locks state a supported range, typically something like 35–55 mm. Indian main doors vary a lot, and a solid teak door can be well outside it.
- Existing lock type. A mortise lock set into the edge of the door, a rim lock surface-mounted on the inside, or a cylindrical latch. Each needs a different smart lock, and they are not interchangeable.
- Backset. The distance from the door edge to the centre of the handle hole. If a replacement does not match, the holes do not line up and you are into carpentry.
- Which way the door opens. Inward or outward, left or right. Many locks are handed, and the wrong hand means the handle points the wrong way.
Photograph the door edge with the existing lock visible and the measurements written down. Any competent supplier can tell you from that whether a given lock fits. Almost nobody does this and it is the cause of most returns.
The features that actually matter
A physical key override
Non-negotiable. Batteries fail, electronics fail, and a door you cannot open is a serious problem rather than an inconvenience. Any lock without a mechanical keyway should be off your list, whatever else it does.
Emergency external power
Most good locks have a small contact on the outside that takes a USB power bank, enough to run the keypad long enough to get in. Check it is there and check it is reachable from outside, not from the inside panel, which would be useless.
Honest battery behaviour
A lock should warn you well in advance — weeks, not hours — through the app and with an audible prompt at the door. Ask how long batteries last in normal use. Anything claiming a year with heavy fingerprint use and Wi-Fi always on is being optimistic.
Related: many locks save battery by keeping Wi-Fi off and only connecting through a bridge or when woken. That is sensible engineering, but it means remote unlocking is not instant. Know which behaviour you are buying.
Auto-lock, with a thought first
Auto-lock after a set delay is useful and is also the single easiest way to lock yourself out on a balcony or landing. If you enable it, make sure at least two people have working codes and that a key lives somewhere sensible.
Multiple access methods
Fingerprint for the household, a code for staff, a card for the grandparent who finds fingerprints unreliable, and the key in reserve. Fingerprint readers are noticeably less reliable with wet or very dry hands, which in a monsoon climate matters more than the datasheet suggests.
What to be sceptical about
- “Military-grade encryption.” Means nothing. Ask instead whether the account supports two-factor authentication and whether firmware updates have actually been issued in the past year.
- Face recognition at the price point. Cheap face unlock on a door lock is often slower and less reliable than a fingerprint, and sometimes fooled by a photograph. On an expensive lock with proper depth sensing it works well. The gap between the two is wide.
- Cloud-only operation. The keypad and fingerprint must work with no internet at all. If the lock needs to reach a server to decide whether your code is valid, walk away.
- Brands with no local service. A lock is a safety-critical item fitted to your front door. If the company disappears, you want a locksmith to be able to deal with it. Favour brands with a service presence you can actually reach.
That last point is not specific to locks. It applies to every device you put in the house, and it is the difference between an outage costing you remote access and an outage costing you the use of your home. We set out the test for it in what should still work when the internet goes down.
Fitting it
Replacing a mortise lock is carpentry as much as electronics — the recess often needs to be enlarged, and a sloppy job leaves a door that does not close cleanly or a lock that binds in humid weather. If you are confident with a chisel, it is doable. If you are not, this is not the item to learn on.
After fitting, before you trust it: lock and unlock it thirty times by every method, from both sides, with the door open and then closed. Problems with alignment show up on repetition, not on the first try.
Who should probably not buy one
We would rather say this than sell one into a situation where it will be resented.
- A rented flat where the landlord has not agreed. Replacing the lock on the main door is not a reversible change in the way a smart bulb is, and it is the kind of thing that surfaces awkwardly at the end of a tenancy.
- A household where one person will refuse to use it. This is more common than you would think, often an older parent, and it is a reasonable position rather than a technophobic one. If the key has to keep working for them, make sure the lock you buy has a proper keyway and that using it does not trip an alarm or confuse the log.
- A main door that is already in poor condition. A smart lock on a warped door that needs a shove to close will bind, jam and drain batteries. Fix the door first; the lock will not fix it for you.
- Where the only goal is convenience for one person. If nobody else needs access and you always carry your keys, a smart lock is a solution to a problem you do not have. Spend the money on lighting.
Grill doors and second doors
Many Indian homes have two doors at the entrance: an outer grill or mesh door and an inner main door. This arrangement is worth thinking through before buying, because it catches people out.
If the grill door is locked independently, a smart lock on the inner door does not get anyone in — your cook still needs a key for the outer one, and you have solved nothing. The options are a second smart lock on the grill, which is usually impractical because grill doors are thin and rarely take a standard lock body, or a smart latch or electric strike on the grill operated from the app or a keypad.
Our usual recommendation is simpler: decide which door is actually the security door and which is the ventilation door, and automate the first while leaving the second on a simple latch that is not locked when someone is expected. A plan that requires two codes at two doors in the rain will be abandoned within a month.
Before the installer leaves
Five minutes of checking saves a call later.
- Lock and unlock from both sides by every method you intend to use.
- Close the door fully and repeat. Many alignment problems only appear under the door’s own weight.
- Confirm the physical key works and that you have both copies.
- Find the emergency power contact yourself, so you are not looking for it in the dark in two years.
- Add one time-limited code and watch it expire, so you know the feature does what you think it does.
- Check the log shows all of the above. A lock whose log is incomplete is not giving you the thing you bought it for.
A sensible way to live with one
- Give every regular visitor their own code, never a shared one.
- Time-limit staff codes to the hours they actually need.
- Delete a code the day someone stops coming, not eventually.
- Change the master code if a device with the app on it is lost.
- Keep a physical key somewhere outside the flat — a neighbour, the office, a bag you carry.
- Check the battery warning instead of dismissing it, which everyone does once.
A lock is rarely the right first purchase. If you are planning a flat from scratch, this is the order we would do it in.
Questions on this
A well-designed lock warns you for weeks first, and almost all of them have an emergency power contact on the outside that takes a power bank, which gets you in. There should also be a physical key override. If a lock has neither, do not buy it.
A smart lock runs on its own batteries, not on mains, so a power cut does not affect it. What a power cut affects is your Wi-Fi, which means remote unlocking stops working — the keypad, fingerprint and key all continue as normal.
The lock body and the deadbolt determine that, exactly as with any lock, and good smart locks use the same mechanisms as good conventional ones. The additional risk is digital, and it is managed by using a long code, not reusing it, enabling two-factor on the account and removing codes for people who no longer need them.
Want this done in your home rather than doing it yourself? Tell us about the place and we will say what is realistic — including when the honest answer is that you do not need us.