Schlage’s Hands-Free UWB Sense Pro Smart Lock is Finally Here
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One of the biggest challenges with many of Apple’s smart home features is how much they rely on third-party accessory makers. The company frequently announces new features or categories of devices in a major iOS update, only to leave customers waiting months or years before they can actually use those in their own homes.
Sometimes that’s at least partly on Apple, as we saw with support for robot vacuums, which was promised for iOS 18 at WWDC 2024 but didn’t arrive until iOS 18.4 in early 2025. Of course, it’s not like manufacturers were beating down Apple’s doors to add support; robo-vacs mostly tied into HomeKit via the open Matter standard, but there were surprisingly few devices that were even ready for that at the time.
That same year Apple baked another feature into iOS 18 — proximity-based Home Key support — that was ready to go right away on the software side. However, with no smart locks available to support the feature at launch, eager customers were once again left hanging.
While Apple had released Home Key three years earlier in iOS 15, allowing users to store and share digital keys in the Wallet app, the keys themselves could only be used over Near Field Communication (NFC), requiring a tap-to-unlock action similar to how Apple Pay works with contactless payment terminals. That was still much better than fishing for your keys, but it wasn’t quite as elegant as some of the proximity-based unlocking features that other companies like August had been able to implement using Bluetooth and geofencing.
As with other new HomeKit initiatives, accessory makers had to update their devices to add NFC support. One of the first out of the gate was Schlage’s Encode Plus, which mixed NFC in with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Thread for maximum compatibility. Announced at the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), it went on sale in April, and can still be found on Amazon for $319.
However, anyone who’d been paying attention to the progress of Apple’s Car Key feature knew a better way was coming. In early 2021, less than a year after the NFC version of Car Key first debuted for select BMW vehicles, the automaker announced it would be embracing Ultra Wideband (UWB), enabling proximity-based unlocking.
Apple had already added UWB support to its devices with the iPhone 11 and Apple Watch Series 6, so they were ready for the new Car Key standard. Despite this, it took until 2024 for Apple to add these capabilities to its Home Key spec to allow a homeowner to unlock their front door on approach without the need to tap their iPhone or Apple Watch against the lock.
Of course, as with the original Home Key, this required new locks with UWB chips — and none of those existed in the fall of 2024. Schlage seemingly came to the rescue again in early 2025 with the Sense Pro Smart Deadbolt. However, while this was announced at that year’s CES, it wasn’t a typical spring release — at least not that same spring.
As the months wore on, many were questioning if it would appear at all, but, better late than never, the Sense Pro is finally available, bringing advanced Home Key support and all the other usual features.
This is part of what Schlage calls its new “Converge” technology, which implies it’s adopted its own spin on the standard Ultra Wideband techniques. The company says it will “calculate your speed, trajectory and motion to the door” to confirm that you actually want to enter the house, versus simply passing by or moving around outside your house while packing the car.
Of course, some of this is just the nature of how UWB works. Unlike Bluetooth, it’s still a relatively short-range technology, which should reduce false positives by its very nature. By contrast, Bluetooth-based solutions like the August Smart Lock Pro have to resort to other tricks like geofencing to ensure the proximity unlocking feature only works only after you’ve gone a certain distance away from your home and returned.
In an unusual twist, the Sense Pro is an entirely different design from the Encode Plus, as the names imply. Despite feeling like an expansion on the company’s older “Sense” series locks, one of which I’ve been using on my side door since 2016, the Sense Pro has a more minimalist look, with a subtle touchscreen keypad that just looks like a matte-black surface when it’s not active.
That’s a reasonable design, considering how rarely the keypad should be necessary on a lock like this. Even my venerable Sense and more recently acquired Encode Plus rarely see the keypad touched. I usually unlock the side door from the Home app, and the front door using NFC from my Apple Watch.
Schlage’s Sense Pro promises to take that to a whole new level, replicating the experience I had with the August Pro on my front door — before the motor finally gave out and I was forced to spring for the Encode Plus instead of waiting for the Sense Pro to arrive — but doing it a whole lot more reliably than the hit-or-miss Bluetooth proximity design.
I’ll have more to share on the Sense Pro once it arrives and I’ve had a chance to put it through the paces, but in the meantime you can find it on Amazon for $399.99 in matte black or satin nickel finishes, along with other major retailers like Home Depot and Lowe’s.
