Samsung announced an interesting step at their Developers Conference last week. They will adopt the new Aliro standard, which will bring a universal standard to unlock your Smart Lock with your digital wallet, like Apple Home Key. This means Android users will be able to use this functionality as early as next year. While Apple Home Key is available on multiple locks in the United States for a while now, in Europe there’s only one lock supporting this method of unlocking your door: the Aqara U200. Samsung says it’s working with multiple brands like Aqara to bring Aliro to the Samsung Wallet.
Compatible locks
The Aliro standard is currently still in its early days, as there are nog locks announced yet to support Aliro. While it was already known several major companies like Apple, Google and Samsung participate in this new standard, official support was not yet announced for specific wallets. It’s expected that Google and Apple will also support the new standard within their respective Wallets. Next to an Apple Pay like experience by tapping your phone to the lock to unlock the door, Aliro will also support unlocking the door by approaching it with your phone. This uses the UWB chip in your phone to determine the distance between your phone and the lock and also on which side of the lock you are. This will require updated chips in smart locks, so we still need to wait for the first locks to arrive with a UWB chip. It’s also interesting to see whether existing locks with Apple Home Key support will be updated to the Aliro standard with a software update. In that case, Android users could benefit from tapping their phone to the lock to unlock their doors.
For Android / Samsung users it might be interesting to wait a bit for the first locks to arrive with Aliro, as there’s currently no support announced for existing locks on the market. We will keep you up to date on this website as soon as more news is available on compatible locks and the Aliro standard.
