I installed one of these just about two weeks ago. I have mixed feelings but slightly erring towards positive.
To @CO_4X4’s point, it is a little expensive. They seem to be encouraging people to put these on every window in their marketing… that’s never going to happen. It’s too much and too slow. Even if I were a billionaire, it’s just not to the point where I’d have it on every window.
Where it has been great is automating the sliding glass door to my patio. Like many owners of such a door, I’ve never felt like the standard latch lock is terribly secure, so we took to putting a physical block to keep it from sliding. But of course, there’s no way to place or remove that from the outside, so it was never great for leaving through the back door. This largely fixes that by essentially functioning as a dead bolt.
Of course the main feature is “automated” opens and closes. And … it’s not great, honestly. It’s just… “good enough” It’s a lot slower than you probably want it to be. I’ve gotten used to it… but it’s definitely slower than just pulling and pushing the door open and closed with your hand. I’d liken it to the difference between manual and automated garage door openers (which is pretty much how it works)
which leads to that release string @Joel_DE was talking about. Honestly, that’s more of an emergency feature than a day to day operation. Again, like the pull release on a garage door. In fact, I’d worry about it wearing out if it was used too often.
As far as interface, I really hope you can figure it out @Joel_DE. Because right now it isn’t really integrated into anything. It doesn’t work with HomeKit, so you have to launch a custom app on your phone or watch in order to open or close the door and that’s just ridiculously inconvenient. And the watch app is quite buggy. And if you had any other smart watch… you’re out of luck I guess. It does integrate with Alexa and Google Home, but in the worst possible way… you just tell door to open and close and it does… so you’d be entirely giving up security if you used it. You can set a PIN… but since it’s verbal and not user specific, the first time you used it in earshot of a neighbor you’re essentially giving away the key to your house.
There are little key fobs you can buy that can also double as doggie door passes. Those work pretty good, but now I’m basically carrying another thing on my keychain… which is so anti what I want as a smart home enthusiast. But if I could trigger it with a random NFC reader keyed to something I already carry… no we’d be talking.
So yeah… I’ll be following this closely and rooting for you.