Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsInitial Impressions Good - Time will tell about battery life
Reviewed in the United States on June 10, 2023
EDIT: 8/7/23 - Included Cheapo Batteries died (temperate zone temps, one or two motorized locks a day [unlocked for most of day]) Going to see how long Energizer Max batteries last
Most of stuff below is still valid, lock seems fine, it occasionally makes chime noises by itself with no one nearby, so not sure what that is
END EDIT
I took a chance on this as this seems to be a lower cost homekey compatible Door lock that I wanted to put on back door. I'm comparing it to the Schlage Encode Plus that I have on my front door, Kwikset Homekit Premis and August 2nd Gen which this is replacing to get to a full native homekit door setup. (The August was working within homekit by using homebridge)
I watched the initial review videos which is what convinced me as well. I also have other Aqara items and the brand seems to solid and I felt comfortable testing.
Initial Impressions are good, the unit is hefty and seems well built, the backplate is a little plasticky compared to schlage and kwikset, but pretty good. You'll need a long shaft philips head driver to attach the back lock to the door plate, that's the only real issue I had with install.
They only include QR codes to manual and install video, which was okay, but don't expect detailed paper instructions.
Install was fine, trickier for me because I had old 3/4" crossbore/Door Latch hole which I had to enlarge. If you have standard 1" crossbore, you should be fine. The screw on the door jamb side could be longer for security reasons, but the back door its mounted on has a window on it.
Aqara pairing was fine, it did have firmware update issue that kept failing, force closing the app and restarting solved the issue. Firmware update happened fine, but took 5ish minutes.
Registering fingerprint was easy, its similar to touch ID where it asks you to touch it 7 times.
Binding to Homekit app was fine from Aqara App, it even imported the passcode I set on the aqara side to the homekit side. Homekey worked fine.
It seems binding to an Aqara hub may improve HomeKit response times.
In all, seems like solid cheaper competitor to the Schlage Encode Plus. The fingerprint feature if reliable is nice bonus compared to the encode plus. Time will tell about battery life. I'm tempted to get another to replace the kwikset homekit premis. I'm comfortable rating this 5/5 for now unless I encounter issues or if it eats batteries (it does come with some cheapo batteries which I appreciated).