Your Front Door Just Got an Open Standard. Your House Is Still Waiting.

Every smart lock I've ever specced has had the same problem. It works brilliantly, right up until the guest with the wrong phone, the visitor who needs a temporary code, or the app update that logs everyone out at once. Digital keys never really went away as an idea. They just never agreed on a language.

That's changing. In February 2026, the Connectivity Standards Alliance, the same body behind Matter, finalised version 1.0 of a new standard called Aliro. It's built to do for door locks what Matter did for lightbulbs and thermostats: let one credential work across brands instead of forcing a different app for every lock on the property.

The backing list is the interesting part. Apple, Google, Samsung, ASSA ABLOY (which owns Yale), Allegion (which owns Schlage), Infineon, NXP, and a run of chip and lock manufacturers are all signed on. That's not a startup pitching a nice-to-have. That's most of the access control industry agreeing on plumbing at the same time.

What Aliro actually standardises

Aliro isn't another Matter device category. It's a separate, deliberately narrower standard that only handles one exchange: is this phone or wearable allowed through this door, right now.

It runs over three radios depending on the situation. NFC handles the tap-to-open case, and because of how NFC hardware works, it can still function even when the phone's battery has died. Bluetooth Low Energy manages the initial handshake as you approach. Ultra-wideband adds precise distance measurement, so the lock can tell whether you're actually standing at the door or whether someone's trying to stretch your phone's signal from across the room, a known attack against older proximity-based locks.

None of that exchange touches your home Wi-Fi or a hub. It's phone-to-lock, direct.

That last point matters here in Joburg more than it does in the marketing copy. A credential check that doesn't depend on your router being up is one less thing that fails when the power drops. The lock itself still needs power to do anything at all, battery or otherwise, but the authentication step isn't waiting on your internet connection to come back after an outage.

Where Aliro's job ends

Matter and Aliro are run by the same organisation but they do different jobs on purpose. Matter is the layer that says "lock the door at 10pm" or "tell me if the battery's low." Aliro is the layer that says "yes, let this specific person in." One manages the device. The other checks the credential.

Which means Aliro, even once every lock on the market supports it, still only answers one question: can this person open this door. It says nothing about what happens the second after they do.

That's always been the actual job on the projects I run. A front door is the first domino, not a standalone event. Someone unlocking it at 6pm on a weekday should trigger something different from someone unlocking it at 2am. A contractor's temporary credential should behave differently from the homeowner's. An unlock during an armed-away state should do more than just open a door, it should disarm the right zone, bring up hallway lighting, and log exactly who came in and when, not just that "the door" opened.

None of that logic lives in a lock, no matter how good the lock's own standard gets. It lives in whatever's actually running the house. On the projects I build, that's KNX as the wired backbone talking to Home Assistant, with a lock's dry contact or open-collector output feeding straight into a KNX binary input. The credential check happens at the door. Everything downstream of that, the scene, the alarm state, the audit trail, happens on the bus.

What this means at the brief stage

If you're specifying access control on a build right now, Aliro is worth knowing about, but it doesn't change what needs to happen at design stage. You still need to decide, before the conduit goes into the slab, which entry points report their state back into the automation system and which ones don't. A lock that's Aliro-certified in 2027 will still need a physical output wired to something if you want its unlock event to do anything beyond unlocking.

The practical advice hasn't shifted: spec the access control gateway or relay interface alongside the lock itself, not as an afterthought once the lock's already ordered. We work closely with trusted specialists across security, access control, and CCTV to get that wiring right at the point where it's still cheap to change.

Aliro is a good, overdue development. It'll mean fewer apps, fewer proprietary dead ends, and a real answer to the "which lock works with which phone" question that's dogged this category for a decade. On its own, it's still only half a smart home. The other half is a design decision, made with an integrator, before the walls close up.

Just a conversation about what the project needs.

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Wayne Du Bruyn

KNX Logic

wayne@knxlogic.co.za | 082 564 3982 | www.knxlogic.co.za

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Sources: Hackster.io, "The Connectivity Standards Alliance's Aliro Smart Lock Standard Hits 1.0" (hackster.io); matter-smarthome.de, "What Is the Aliro Standard?" (matter-smarthome.de)