Yale Access Reviews

YaleAccess has basic functionality, such as lock and unlock, and allows you to track the status over time. If you have door sense, it also tracks that aspect. Beyond that, YaleAccess is kind of useless. No clear way to check if there is an update for your lock, no way to determine battery life remaining or get a notification of low battery life, and the auto-unlock aspect frequently just decides it is going to stop working; requiring you to set it up again. Honestly, this is my second Yale product and will likely be my last. Just this morning my lock wouldn’t take entry and started alarming for no reason. I just changed the batteries a week ago. For the cost of these products, a mediocre experience is unacceptable. YaleAccess certainly isn’t helping things.

BEWARE!!! YaleAccess and its associated lock are a HUGE security risk!!! Case in point: After receiving help from Yale tech support just now, I’ve learned that if someone ever closes the door and shakes the internal wireless module loose (even slightly), the module will lose connectivity. But, that’s the not worst part. Once the module loses connectivity, YaleAccess continues to report the last state the lock was in before it lost connectivity. Today, YaleAccess showed that the door was locked, when it was, in fact, unlocked. This is a HUGE security risk, since the user is led to believe that the door is locked, when it is not. What YaleAccess should do is report that the status is unknown, due to its inability to connect to the wireless module. This is poor design from a company that markets a product meant to provide security to home owners. This is the single worst scenario and one all home owners should be concerned about. I’m surprised Yale continues to sell their locks along with flawed software. YaleAccess and the Yale lock have been out for quite a while now. How this flaw hasn’t been addressed yet is beyond me. Both should be avoided at all cost!! I am trashing this risk of a security solution and will invest in a more secure and reliable one.

I bought 2, one for an Airbnb and one for my own house. I liked the design and the password for the airbnb is useful. The problem is that YaleAccess doesn’t tell you when the batteries life (4 batteries AAA) YaleAccess doesn't even send you a message to prevent.
One day my Airbnb guest were no able to go into the house on a rainy day because the batteries were gone. They had to wait inside their car until I was able to drive and open with the master key. Another day my mother in law was gonna take care of my dog and again the batteries were done. And is not something that you can control like: I'll change the batteries every 15 days or every month, because the batteries die according the use of the opening/closing door. So it can be a month, 15 days or a week.
And let me remind you that they are 4 AAA batteries that they recommend in the instructions that cannot be rechargeable.
I tried to return both and once they have been installed there is not return.
Waste of money (they are not cheap) and a head ache having to have a calendar note every 15 days to go and change the batteries.

If you are added as a guest to someone, you cannot remove the home from your keychain. In my case, I bought an August for an ex girlfriend three years ago and a Yale for my current girlfriend this Christmas. The ex never removed me as a guest on her lock. My new girlfriend saw the other girl in my keychain list as we were setting it up and immediately started questioning me. So fun! There was no way to delete it. Apparently it cannot be deleted without having the owner do so, whom I have zero contact with and for all I know, she’s moved or thrown the product away. It’s absolutely insane that you cannot remove yourself from another persons lock and you will forever see that person pop up on your home screen in the Yale app you personally use. Called Yale and emailed customer support to have it removed. Their response is that they nor I can remove it from “MY YALE APP” and that she has to remove me. Get it together Yale! This is absolutely ridiculous you can’t remove yourself from a lock in your own app. Would upgrade to 5 stars if it weren’t for this needless headache.

I’m a strange case admittedly (using the Linus lock in the US where it isn’t sold) but I had been happily using the Linus and Assure locks with the Yale Access app for about 2 years now. After weeks of annoying popups to switch to the Yale Home app (not something I can access in the US) I have seen the Linus is now gone from the Access app. I had to contact UK support to be directed to download the Gateman app (I believe that’s for the Korean market) which now allows me to see my Linus (but not my Assure) again. So now I have 2 virtually identical AssaAbloy apps on my phone, one for each lock. And the Gateman app will not let me add new devices (my Linus’s keypad accessory broke so I will need to replace it, which now seems impossible). These apps all appear to be offshoots of the August app but they are being restricted for no apparent reason or benefit. Again, I know they don’t sell the lock here, but it was working great until someone decided it shouldn’t. Anyway I should have just purchased one from Nuki or Tedee.

Since this was the first smart lock that I’ve used I didn’t realize what features were essential. I did my homework comparing but thought this was going to be worth the high cost.

WRONG! I have a Yale Assure Lock 2 which I bought in early 2023. I had problems beginning with the setup. When it finally “worked” it only “worked” occasionally.

Every update of YaleAccess made things worse. By the time I was going to give up, the return window had passed so I decided to try to stick it out.

About 6 months ago (more than a year after I bought the lock), YaleAccess seemed to be working better.

Then the last update 3 days ago broke the ONE feature that ALWAYS worked for me…the Auto-Lock Instant. Now it doesn’t work at all!!!! When it first happened, I tried restarting YaleAccess , restarting the phone. No change. So I try YaleAccess on my Apple Watch…oh wait…lucky if that works 50% of the time. Try using Siri….oh no, communications error with the lock! What a shocker!

So now I have to use my KEY to lock my “smart” lock which I paid over $200 for.

This whole thing has been a joke (on me). One day I’ll be changing it out but just writing this has wasted too much of my time.

If you’re thinking of getting a Yale lock, RUN to your second choice!

YaleAccess was great for the first year now I get a huge almost full screen popup after every button press warning me that it will stop working soon and click to download the new app - when I try to click to download the new one it says not available in my region (I’m in USA and got lock at Costco)

Contacted tech support and they told me tj just ignore it and keep using YaleAccess but after clicking close on the popup about 20x per day for the past few months I finally hit my limit and wrote the first bad review of anything I’ve ever written, shame on you Yale Support, should have never bought three of your locks if I was not a repeat customer I would just replace the lock and get a working app.

Nice planning guys. I live in San Diego. I have a condo over the border right here in Mexico. I can no longer get into your app because you changed things. I called your support team couple months ago when I kept getting pop-up notifications to switch to a different app. All of your support reps told me I don’t need to do that and I can just ignore the prompt. Now I can’t get into YaleAccess at all. When I’m in Mexico. Which is when I need to access it most of the time. Did you perhaps think that maybe some of the users might have homes in different countries? Do you think maybe you might want to educate your support reps on what they’re actually supposed to tell people? What am I going to do now??

Look out for those undocumented ‘features.’ If you share your entire home with partner or family, friends, now Yale makes that a right PIA. You can no longer share your home and all you devices are shared…instead sharing your entire home now EXCLUDES Yale apps.

Yale wants a phone number for every shared key, device etc. Merits of Yale digital security aside Yale has no business knowing who or storing phone numbers of shared locks - let Apple handle sharing, the Apple Home app is designed.

We have had a nice home network for the last three years and now Yale “yaled” us by changing how everything works..so not able to share my own lock with myself or others who might not have a phone number (yep, we have a few of those.)

Everyone has to give their phone number to use it…and you can’t create/copy/share with anyone who does not have a phone number or when you need a second account is often our use case. Maddening…further exasperated by Yale offshore support stonewalling and blocking. We miss the old Yale.

Update - sharing now ALSO requires the person sharing to not only provide their phone number but to install and manage a Yale profile - this is insane.

As a software developer myself, I have no idea how YaleAccess is in production right now.

- The user interface is a mess and is completely unintuitive. How about following Apple’s iOS user interface guidelines instead of whatever this is?
- it takes multiple attempts to delete guests or add guests.
- setup is a jumbled mess. I’ve installed 9 of these in the past few months along with the connect and it has never just worked. It’s become comical how bad it is.
- poor feedback - where are the success and failure messages tied to actions and why do they sent false positives?
- actions are completely unreliable and can’t be trusted.
- the program hangs when adding or deleting users or doing any action for that matter.
- if you want to give access to an existing guest on another lock when having multiple locks, you can’t. You have to completely delete the user and start over. Do you guys do any UX research? This is fundamental.

I suspect Yale has outsourced development to the lowest bidder as it makes no sense how fundamentally broken YaleAccess is for a company this size. While the Yale lock itself is a solid piece of hardware, the software that interacts / manages it is an absolute train wreck.

We connected our short term rental hosting platform (Hospitable) with the lock that had a WiFi bridge. We ran into a host of issues.

1. There were always connectivity issues between the lock and YaleAccess and our hosting platform. Our hosting platform provided great support but it always seemed to fail with the actual lock and app themselves. Whenever we contacted Yale support, we were always directed back to our hosting platform….like why don’t you start talking to each other??!

2. YaleAccess for the lock I used was not intuitive and had awful UX/UI. YaleAccess felt like it was designed in the dawn of app building and was never given a refresh. You’re a few layers deep, press a button that you think will take you up one layer, but then you’re taken back to the beginning.

3. There are better options. Sorry to say this on another app’s page, but the Schlage lock and app are both 10x better. No connectivity issues and much more intuitive app UI/UX. Honestly, the Schlage app still has points of improvement but I consider the Yale app a hot burning mess compared to Schlage.

App works fine, but why do I need to make 2-3 clicks to get to the right lock? To clarify - the hardware/locks themselves are amazing and I am buying more - but YaleAccess is very limited. I mostly control the locks through Apple HomeKit. With HomeKit through bluetooth (base model lock), there is a delay when operating the lock but it’s not too bad. I have 2 locks connected, soon to be 4. When you open the Yale Access app, home screen is called “keychain” with “homes” listed in it and not Keys/Locks. Why? Most people have only one home, so why do I have to fist select/click on a home before seeing my locks? That makes no sense to me. It should be an option for people with multiple homes, not a default for everyone. Once you do select a home to access your locks, you see a drop down menu if you have more than one lock. Why? Why can’t I just see a list of my locks with their statuses? Ideally, once you open YaleAccess you should immediately see the list of your locks with their statuses of locked/unlocked and DoorSense status of closed/open - without having to click multiple times to get to the screen which is most commonly used.

YaleAccess worked great, as did the lock, and then they rolled out a firmware update which has seemed to orphan the lock from YaleAccess . As the old saying goes “ if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”!
I had to remove my batteries and the communication module from the lock wait a minute, and then reinstall.
After that, everything went back to normal.
It should have been known and stated that this would need to be done, as we went to bed thinking the door had auto locked when it always did. Instead our front door remained unlocked until I realized the next day that lock was not functioning. This made me feel uneasy as we have had a lot of burglaries recently in our area.
Up until now, we’ve had a good experience- but this shouldn’t have happened and all the kinks should have been ironed out before a firmware update was rolled out that could impede the functionality of the lock.

I would give YaleAccess a 4/5 star rating for its features and ability to control the lock. Where it suffers is getting it to integrate with HomeKit and other automation systems. So, in order to use Siri, everyone needs to have the highest level of authorization which is ok. It is not so painful to get my wife and two daughters to download YaleAccess , sign up for an account, receive an invitation and accept the invite into the Yale Access world. The next step is where it falls apart. You have to send a HomeKit invite for them to join the HomeKit home through the Yale Access app. What if they are already members of the home? I’ve played with this for weeks and still can’t get them the ability to use Siri. I’ve even taken the nuclear approach of deleting my entire set-up in the Home app (thankfully I only have a few HomeKit devices). So, now I’ve got Siri working for myself only. The other three are stuck with an “Updating” device in the Home app.

We also use Google and while we were able to get the lock linked into our hub the connection is very slow/ spotty even though our signal strengths are strong. I doubt we’ll ever interact with the lock through the Google platform because of this performance.

I’ve reached out to Support and I was referred to the Quick Start guide……thanks Yale, impressive.

Dear Development Team,

Congratulations on making this a good app.
I have a few suggestions tho:

iPhone App:
- change the red circle and the green concentric circles to a lock icon. You can keep the color coding but in this waynits being built now, it's really telling nothing to the user. Green might mean that the door is locked to some users (safety) and red could mean the door is unlocked (danger). I think you already see where I'm getting at. Basic UX through UI.
- add a battery meter somewhere in YaleAccess so that I know when I have to change them. The whole point is not to have to carry a key with me to be able to get in my home (should it remain without batteries)

Apple Watch App:
- complications should show me the status of the lock (locked/unlocked) instead of just being a shortcut to YaleAccess . Now it shows nothing but some lines (as if it can't read the staus of the lock)
- the interface should be changed to what I mentioned for the phone (a more intuitive and easy to read UI, even by the most basic user)

I will change my rating once this feedback will be incorporated.

Thanks
A

For the most part, my 2 Yale Smart Locks are stylish and they work pretty well overall. For my office and cabin, it’s very easy to program new codes for people remotely.

What’s annoying though, is when you accidentally touch anywhere on the keypad and it locks. If they changed the Touch to Lock to just the Yale logo, we would probably have a lot less accidental lockings. The whole surface is just too sensitive.

Also, the external wifi module has to be plugged in near the door. Not a fan odd this. I don’t have this in my other name brand smart lock at my primary residence.

LAST THING, PLEASE ADD A BATTERY METER AND LOW BATTERY NOTIFICATIONS TO YaleAccess .

Every once in awhile, I lose full connection to my locks and I didn’t really know why. It’s because of low battery levels. One two occasions with my cabin, I had to drive 200 miles to change them to let a guest in, even though I had just visited the week before. If only YaleAccess could tell me that they are low, I would have changed batteries well ahead of time.

This issue is two parts.

1. I try to give access to someone by importing them directly from my contact list, it will show the ability to give them access to multiple locks at the same house, but when it’s all finished, they will only have access to one of them.

The workaround requires adding their first and last name manually

2. If I want to give them access to multiple properties after doing the above workaround, when I hit the save button, I have to wait extra long after it says “saved” and then it will save again. If you back out too early, it will only give access to the first property.

Bottom line, some optimization should be done for this process. I am a property manager, and I would really appreciate browser access when managing these locks, not just via mobile apps.

I was really hesitant to buy into the smart lock world, after having nothing but trouble with a Kwikset push button lock. Researched locks, quality, durability, reviews, and costs. Was not initially pleased to spend over $200, but that was the worst of it. The lock works almost perfectly, except for when I accidentally kill YaleAccess , so it doesn’t unlock automatically upon my arrival at home, but that’s my fault for closing YaleAccess . Lock quality has been great, it unlocks quickly and with no issues. Door locks/unlocks within 2 seconds of initiation. Looking forward to eventually replacing the Schlage with the same lock set.

These locks are excellent for our AirBnB units that we manage from far away. We can set codes for Maintenance personnel, cleaners, and house guests. If they need temporary access or permanent, and we can easily monitor and see who entered and when they left. We had one tech problem we could not figure out but called support and they were able to help us rectify and get it working again. So far, they were worth the money we paid!

I bought a second lock for a second home, which works as expected and has great functionality. I was impressed with the new door ajar feature that I don’t have on my first lock. But I was disappointed that I have to use two Yale apps for different generation locks and the lack of a battery indicator on the newer app is a poor design choice. I leave the second house for long periods and I want to be sure the caretaker can get in.