ULTRALOQ launches Bolt Mission, its first UWB smart lock for Apple Home

The Bolt Mission combines Bluetooth Low Energy discovery, UWB and built-in radar-based presence sensing to determine whether a person is approaching the door from outside or from inside the home, 9to5Mac reported. Rather than simply checking whether an authorized iPhone is nearby, the lock analyzes distance and direction of approach and makes the decision locally, the report said. The intent-detection logic runs between the iPhone and the lock without a cloud connection or a hub inside the home.

According to 9to5Mac, users can keep the iPhone in a pocket while the Xthings Home app runs in the background, and the door unlocks as they walk up to it. The report compares the spatial awareness to the accuracy of UWB in AirTags and says it is more precise than Bluetooth-based auto-unlock, which the columnist describes as having failed for no specific reason in their own use.

The Bolt Pro and the Latch 5 Pro are Aliro-certified, which the report says means tap-to-unlock through Apple Wallet or Samsung Wallet. Aliro is an open standard developed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, the same organization behind Matter, with support from Apple, Google and Samsung. The report states that Aliro tap-to-unlock is not the same as Apple Home Key, Apple's own NFC implementation, so buyers who require Home Key would have to look at other products.

The Bolt Pro is a deadbolt, while the Latch 5 Pro covers lever-style doors such as side entrances, garage-entry doors and home offices, according to the report. Both support fingerprint reading, PIN codes, app control and a physical key as a backup alongside the digital wallet option. The columnist, who says they keep an older Bolt in their office, singles out fingerprint unlock as a feature they use.

9to5Mac writes in its HomeKit Weekly column that the Bolt Mission is the product in the new collection it is most interested in testing, because UWB-based detection is a different approach to hands-free unlocking. The report adds that the Bolt Mission and the rest of the collection can be bought from Amazon or directly from ULTRALOQ, and it does not give prices for any of the three locks.