Have you ever tried to make HomeKit automatically unlock your deadbolt when arriving home? I’ve tried to do this very thing several times, and it never worked right—until I figured out a workaround for Apple’s secure scenes.
Here’s how I made my HomeKit lock bend to my will and automatically unlock when I arrive home.
What Is a Secure Scene in HomeKit
Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek | Milad Fakurian / Unsplash
Secure HomeKit scenes threw me off initially. What makes them different from a normal scene?
Well, secure scenes are automatic and happen any time a scene has a security-related device included. The list of security devices includes locks, cameras, garage doors, motorized windows, and anything else that has to do with your home’s security.
A secure scene requires an additional step to trigger, even if you tell it to trigger automatically. For me, I had a scene set up that said, “Whenever anyone arrives home, unlock the front door.” This seems simple, but with HomeKit, it would require additional authentication to trigger.
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Almost every smart home needs these scenes.
The odd part is, secure scenes always require extra authentication to trigger. If you have a scene set that says “When anyone leaves home, shut the garage door and lock the front door,” you have to authenticate before it runs—even though it’s shutting doors and locking locks.
HomeKit can’t really differentiate between closing down scenes and opening scenes, so if a scene requires any form of secure device control, it’ll trigger the extra authentication.
The extra authentication comes in the form of a notification on your phone. When the scene goes to run, a HomeKit notification will come up, and you have to unlock your phone and tap the notification for it to execute.
I understand why Apple has the extra security for secure scenes. If someone was to steal your phone, and they knew where you lived, all they’d have to do is show up at your front door, and it’d open (or your garage could open). That isn’t a great scenario.
While I understand why Apple does it, I still wish there was a way for me to disable that. My old smart lock supported geo-fence unlocking through its native app, and I loved that. I simply drove home and walked up to the door, where it was unlocked and ready for me to enter.
This is all I want. I want my front door to unlock anytime my wife or I arrive home, and auto lock when either of us leave the house. So, I set out to figure out how to do this.
While my old smart lock (an August/Yale) supported it in-app, my new smart lock (which supports Apple HomeKey while my old one does not) doesn’t have the same functionality in-app, meaning I’d have to turn to HomeKit to accomplish the task.
Brand
Lockly
Connectivity
Wi-Fi
The Lockly Visage smart lock is a unique piece of smart home gear as it delivers multiple ways to unlock your door. From Apple HomeKit and HomeKey support to an auto-rotating PIN keypad for enhanced privacy, the Lockly Visage is a great addition to any smart home. It’s also an industry-first smart lock with facial recognition technology, automatically unlocking for faces that you program into it.
However, HomeKit prevents me from doing this because of secure scenes—or does it?
How Do You Bypass a Secure Scene?
While Apple’s intent with secure scenes is to keep you from locking or unlocking a door without authenticating, there are ways around it.
To get around secure scenes, you’ll have to have a non-secure device that you can trigger when arriving home or leaving. This can be a plug, switch, or any other device—so long as it isn’t considered “secure” by Apple.
Brand
Eve
Connectivity
Matter
Enjoy multi-platform functionality with this Matter-enabled smart plug, while keeping your data secure. With energy consumption tracking for Apple HomeKit users, the Eve Energy Matter Smart Plug makes a great choice for seamless smart home integration.
The problem is, this device really needs to be dedicated to controlling your door. If the device triggers outside of locking/unlocking the door, your door will simply lock or unlock.
Essentially, to bypass Apple’s secure scenes, you have to create automations that trigger the non-secure device, and then another automation that has the non-secure device trigger the lock or door.
How Home Assistant Plays a Part
I didn’t want to use any of my smart plugs or switches to control the front door, because that would mean anytime that specific device was triggered, my door would lock or unlock.
So, I turned to Home Assistant. Within Home Assistant, I was able to create a dummy input boolean to import into HomeKit. An input boolean is essentially an on/off toggle, like a switch.
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This input boolean could then be dedicated to my front door (and I could make more to trigger other secure devices if I’d want). The only time this input boolean would be turned on or off would be with the front door, meaning I’d never have a false trigger.
Without Home Assistant, I’d really need a dedicated plug—which is entirely doable. However, that costs more money and is something that needs to stay constantly plugged in (and unused for other purposes), so Home Assistant is the best option for me.
How I Use HomeKit to Unlock My Front Door
Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek | Woliul Hasan / Unsplash
Making HomeKit automatically unlock my front door when someone arrives home wasn’t the easiest thing to figure out, but it’s actually not all that difficult to set up once you have the framework ready.
I had to create five total automations. Four automations handle the locking and unlocking of the door, and then the fifth automation is the actual “When anyone arrives home, unlock the door.”
To start with, create two automations for the dummy switch. One automation unlocks the front door when the dummy switch turns on, and locks the front door when the dummy switch turns off.
Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek | Kunal Patil / Unsplash
Next, create two more automations. The first will turn the dummy switch on when the front door unlocks, and the other turns the dummy switch off when the front door is locked.
Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek | Dirk Lach / Unsplash
You need all four of these automations to ensure that things stay in sync. For instance, if you only have the front door set to respond to the dummy switch, and not the other way around, then manually unlocking the front door would leave the dummy switch off.
If that happened, then the entire automation is thrown off. For this automation to work properly, the dummy switch has to control the lock, and the lock has to control the dummy switch.
Once you have all four of those automations set up, you’ll need to create one final automation. This one is where the magic happens. Program an automation that says “When anyone arrives home, turn the dummy switch on.”
When this triggers, the dummy switch turns on, and then the automation runs, which unlocks the front door because the dummy switch is on. It’s that simple.
I have the Lockly app auto-locking the front door after a set time, but if you’d rather keep everything in HomeKit, you could set it to automatically turn the dummy switch off after a certain timeframe (which would automatically lock the door).
Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek | Codioful (Formerly Gradienta) / Unsplash
Truly, this is all that’s required. It took me a while to figure out the steps, and get prepped to execute the steps. However, once I had it all lined up, it was just a few minutes of programming.
Now, make sure these automations populate through iCloud to everyone in the house’s phones. My wife’s phone, for some reason, didn’t get these automations automatically. I could have manually added them, but I just removed her from Apple Home and added her back and that fixed everything.
Now that your front door is automatically unlocking when you come home, why not set up a few more automations for your smart home?
Here are 11 scenes that can revolutionize your smart home. Ranging from waking up to putting your office into work mode, you definitely need to check out some of these scenes and implement them in your daily workflow.
