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Lockin: Independent Reliability Testing Results 2024

Lockin: Independent Reliability Testing Results 2024

8 min read ·

Smart locks are everywhere now—but trusting one with your front door is a very different decision than trusting a smart bulb with your living room lights.

If you’ve ever had a keypad freeze in the winter, a fingerprint reader randomly stop recognizing you, or a “smart” device go totally dumb the second your Wi‑Fi hiccups, you already know: reliability isn’t a spec, it’s a lived experience.

That’s exactly why we put Lockin’s latest palm vein smart lock lineup—especially the Veno Go Palm Vein Smart Lock—through independent reliability testing in 2024. Let’s walk through what was tested, what actually happened, and—most importantly—what it means for your real front door.

Executive Summary

Here’s the big picture in plain language:

Independent testing in 2024 found that Lockin’s Veno series—especially Veno Go—delivers high reliability in real-world conditions, not just in glossy product videos.

Here’s what stood out:

  • Biometrics that work like muscle memory
    Lockin’s Venokey™ palm vein tech consistently unlocked in about the time it takes to blink, even when:
    • Your hands are damp from washing dishes
    • Your skin is dry or cracked from winter
    • There’s a little dirt or light grime from gardening or workouts
    • You’ve got very young kids or older parents using it—hands that often trip up fingerprint readers
  • Spoofing is extremely hard
    The false acceptance rate (FAR) of < 0.00001% is in the same league as medical-grade palm vein systems, making casual attempts to fool it basically a non-issue for everyday life.
  • Built for “real-life weather,” not showroom doors
    With IP53 weatherproofing and an operating range from bitter winter mornings to scorching summer afternoons, the lock stayed stable through:
    • Freezing temperatures
    • Direct sun on dark doors
    • Heavy rain and splashing water
  • Battery that doesn’t keep you guessing
    In real use, testers got up to around 7 months on a single rechargeable battery, plus:
    • Clear low-battery alerts
    • Emergency power via a power bank
    • A good old-fashioned mechanical key backup
  • Smart home friendly without extra boxes
    Built-in Wi‑Fi and Matter support worked reliably with Apple Home, Alexa, Google Home, and SmartThings. No extra hub, no “mystery box” plugged into your router.
Bottom line:
If you care as much about everyday dependability as you do about smart features, the 2024 testing suggests that Lockin’s design choices on Veno Go directly tackle the exact reliability issues that make people give up on smart locks.

Introduction: When “Smart” Fails at the Front Door

Picture this: It’s 11:45 p.m. You’re juggling grocery bags, your kid is asleep in the car, rain is just starting—and your “smart” lock suddenly decides your thumb is suspicious.

You wipe it. You angle it. You try your other hand. Nothing. Now you’re annoyed, your groceries are getting soaked, and you’re wondering why you ever replaced your perfectly fine old deadbolt.

Most people don’t ditch smart locks because they hate technology. They ditch them because:

  • Biometrics become flaky over time
  • Batteries die with little or no warning
  • Wi‑Fi or hubs act up at the worst possible moment
  • Cold, heat, or moisture turn “smart” into “stuck”

Reliability is the make-or-break factor.
You don’t care how futuristic a lock is if it throws a tantrum every time the weather changes or the internet blips.

That’s the mindset independent labs brought to Lockin’s Veno series in 2024. The question wasn’t just “Does it unlock?” but:

“Will it still unlock—quickly and correctly—after months of real life, on a real door, with real people using it?”

Market Insights: The Reliability Gap in Smart Locks

Before we zoom in on the test results, it helps to understand where most smart locks typically stumble.

1. Fingerprint Fatigue

Fingerprint readers sound great on paper. In daily life? Not always.

Common storylines:

  • Winter hits, your skin dries out—suddenly it takes five tries
  • Your parents or grandparents struggle to get recognized
  • Your kids’ tiny fingers just don’t register reliably
  • After months of misreads, everyone quietly goes back to punching in codes or carrying keys

By year two, lots of households have “given up” on the fingerprint feature entirely. It’s there, technically—but nobody trusts it anymore.

2. Weather Sensitivity

Your exterior lock lives a tough life:

  • Blazing sun heating up a dark door like a car dashboard
  • Freezing mornings that stiffen everything
  • Rain, humidity, fog, and general dampness
  • Dust, pollen, and everyday grime

Cheaper sensors and weak sealing don’t hold up well here. Buttons can stick, sensors misbehave, and electronics start to corrode or glitch long before the lock looks “old.”

3. Battery Anxiety

If you’ve ever come home to a door that won’t respond because the battery flatlined, you know this pain.

Typical complaints:

  • Lock dies while you’re away on a trip
  • Low-battery alerts are vague, late, or nonexistent
  • Disposable batteries that need changing so often you start to resent the thing

Battery failure is one of the top reasons people warn friends away from certain smart lock brands.

4. Hub Headaches & Cloud Dependence

Many smart locks bring a little entourage of dependencies:

  • A proprietary hub or bridge that has to stay plugged in
  • A cloud service that can go down or change over time
  • Integrations that behave differently depending on whether you’re on Apple, Google, Alexa, etc.

The result?
Automations break, routines desync, and you get the dreaded “it usually works… except when it doesn’t.”

Put together, this is the reliability gap: in commercials, smart locks look sleek and effortless. By year two in a real home, too many feel fussy, unpredictable, and weirdly stressful.

How Independent Reliability Testing Was Structured

In 2024, independent labs and real-world field testers dug into Lockin’s Veno series—especially Veno Go, the palm vein “starter” model—through four main reliability pillars:

  1. Biometric consistency – Does it actually recognize you, day after day?
  2. Mechanical + environmental durability – Does it survive your weather and front door reality?
  3. Power and battery behavior over time – Does it quietly die on you, or play nice?
  4. Connectivity and smart home stability – Does it stay connected without a lot of babysitting?

To get honest answers, they combined:

  • Lab simulations for extreme temperatures, water exposure, and long-term cycling
  • Field tests on real front doors in different climates
  • Scenario-based testing with families, guests, and service providers coming and going

The bar wasn’t “Can it unlock once in a lab?” but:

“Can it keep unlocking properly, hundreds and thousands of times, in real homes?”

Pillar 1: Biometric Reliability with Palm Vein

Let’s start with Lockin’s secret sauce: Venokey™ Palm Vein Unlock.

Instead of scanning the ridges on your fingertip like a normal fingerprint sensor, it uses near-infrared light to read the unique vein pattern inside your palm.

That inner pattern is:

  • Hidden under your skin, so it’s much harder to copy
  • Far less affected by dry skin, scratches, or surface dirt
  • Stable across ages, from kids to seniors

Think of it less like a surface “stamp” and more like a built-in, under-the-skin signature.

Performance Under Real Conditions

In testing, Veno Go’s palm vein recognition behaved more like a reliable habit than a gadget that might or might not cooperate.

Testers saw:

  • Blink-and-it’s-done unlocks – recognition to unlock in a fraction of a second
  • Very high accuracy under typical household conditions
  • False Acceptance Rate (FAR) < 0.00001%

They tried everyday scenarios like:

  • Hands still damp from washing dishes
  • Light dirt or dryness from gardening or DIY projects
  • Winter-dry, cracked skin
  • Hands with lotion or a bit of sweat after a workout

Where traditional fingerprint readers often throw a fit, palm vein stayed surprisingly calm and consistent. Once a hand was enrolled, it basically just worked across these variations.

Security Implications

That super-low FAR—less than one in many millions—actually matters in practice:

  • Random people messing with the sensor have an extremely low chance of getting in
  • Because the pattern is inside your palm, casual forgery tricks (like photos or lifted fingerprints) don’t really apply

This puts it in the same security neighborhood as healthcare-grade palm vein systems, which is notable for a consumer smart lock.

Pillar 2: Mechanical & Environmental Resilience

Even the smartest software is useless if the physical lock can’t handle your front porch.

This is where the weather and durability tests came in.

Weather and Exposure Testing

For Veno Go, the key protections are:

  • IP53 rating – shrugging off dust and angled water sprays (think heavy rain hitting your door)
  • An operating range from deep-freeze winter mornings to peak summer door temps
  • ANSI/BHMA Grade 3 durability, a recognized residential standard

Testers pushed it with:

  • Rain simulations – prolonged water spray on the exterior keypad and palm reader
  • Temperature cycling – bouncing repeatedly between cold and hot extremes
  • UV & heat – simulated direct sunlight on darker doors that tend to really soak up warmth

Across these trials:

  • The keypad and palm sensor stayed responsive instead of becoming sluggish or stuck
  • The deadbolt and latch continued to operate smoothly
  • No weird glitches, lock-ups, or erratic behavior showed up in the electronics

Real-World Note: Indoor Interior Assembly

The interior assembly is designed for indoor use only and shouldn’t be exposed directly to the elements.

This is standard for most residential smart locks—but it’s worth calling out. On a fully exposed gate or outdoor-only door (like a backyard shed with no interior wall), that matters.
On a typical front door where the inside is… well, inside your house, it wasn’t an issue and didn’t affect reliability.

Pillar 3: Battery & Power Continuity

If you’ve ever stood outside a dead smart lock, you know this is where trust is either built—or lost.

Testers looked at:

  • Real-world battery life with different household sizes
  • How the lock behaved at different charge levels
  • What actually happens when the battery gets very low

Tested Battery Performance

Veno Go runs on a rechargeable battery, with a claim of up to around 7 months per charge.

In mixed, realistic usage:

  • Light to moderate use (smaller household): typically 5–7 months between charges
  • Heavy use (big family, frequent guests, rentals): roughly 3–5 months

Those numbers lined up with Lockin’s claims, as long as:

  • Your Wi‑Fi signal at the door is reasonable (very weak Wi‑Fi makes the lock work harder)
  • You’re not in extreme, constant deep-freeze conditions, which naturally affect all batteries

Backup Measures That Matter

Here’s where reliability really shows up:

  • Low-battery alerts
    You don’t just get a last-second warning—the app gives you a heads-up well before it’s in danger of dying.
  • Emergency power via power bank
    If you somehow miss every alert, you can plug in a power bank right at the door to “jump-start” the lock just long enough to get in.
  • Mechanical key backup
    And if you really want that old-school reassurance, there’s still a traditional keyhole as a final safety net.

In testing, that combination meant battery issues never turned into actual lockouts, as long as people didn’t completely ignore repeated warnings.

For extra peace of mind, some testers noted that adding the Lockin Veno Series Full Power Kit or an extra battery made it very hard to ever fully drain the lock—just rotate or top up occasionally and forget about it.

Pillar 4: Connectivity & Smart Home Reliability

A smart lock that doesn’t play well with the rest of your smart home is just a fancy, app-controlled deadbolt.

Veno Go comes with:

  • Built-in Wi‑Fi – no extra bridge or hub box
  • Matter support for:
    • Apple Home
    • Amazon Alexa
    • Google Home
    • Samsung SmartThings

Why Matter Matters for Reliability

Think of Matter as a universal translator for smart home devices. Instead of each gadget speaking its own private language, they share a common one.

Testing focused on:

  • Pairing stability – Do you have to constantly re-add the lock or reset it?
  • Cross-platform behavior – Does it behave similarly on Apple vs. Google vs. Alexa?
  • Automations – Do routines like “Lock when I leave” or “Unlock for the cleaner at 2 p.m.” actually fire consistently?

The results:

  • Veno Go paired reliably across major platforms via Matter
  • Skipping the proprietary hub removed one more thing that could crash or unplug
  • Common routines—goodnight scenes, arrival automations, scheduled guest access—ran steadily over multi-week tests

Of course, it’s still only as good as your home Wi‑Fi. But by removing extra hubs and cloud dependencies, Lockin cut down on many of the usual failure points.

Product Relevance: Where Veno Go Stands in the Veno Lineup

Lockin’s smart lock family is built around the same Venokey™ palm vein core, then branches out with different feature sets and price points:

  • Veno Go – Palm Vein Starter
  • Veno – Palm Vein Core
  • Veno Plus – Best Value Pick
  • Veno Pro – Ultimate Flagship

From a reliability standpoint, Veno Go is interesting because it focuses on the essentials:

  • The same palm vein recognition engine as its pricier siblings
  • The same weather-ready exterior design
  • Family-focused features that actually matter day-to-day:
    • PIN codes with custom schedules (great for dog walkers, cleaners, or guests)
    • Anti-peep virtual passcodes (you can add extra digits before/after your real code)
    • Easy pause/resume for access without fully deleting a user
  • Built-in Wi‑Fi and Matter, so no compromises on smart home integration

In other words, it’s designed as an entry point into the Veno ecosystem that doesn’t cut corners on the stuff that makes a smart lock feel trustworthy.

Actionable Tips: How to Choose a Reliable Smart Lock in 2024

Independent testing makes something very clear: a lot of smart locks are built to impress on the product page, not to quietly perform in year three.

Whether you go with Lockin or another brand, here’s a simple checklist to sanity-check reliability.

1. Look Beyond “Fingerprint Unlock”

Ask yourself:

  • How does this lock handle wet, dry, or dirty hands?
  • Is the biometric tech internal (like palm vein) or surface-only (like fingerprints)?
  • Does the brand publish any false acceptance rate or reliability data?

If your household includes kids, seniors, or people who work with their hands, palm vein or similarly robust biometrics can be a much better fit than fingerprint-only systems.

2. Check Weather & Durability Ratings

Don’t skip the fine print here.

Look for:

  • At least IP53 or similar protection against dust and rain on the exterior
  • A clearly stated operating temperature range
  • A recognized durability standard like ANSI/BHMA Grade 3 or better

If your front door gets harsh sun, icy winters, or coastal weather, these aren’t “nice-to-haves”—they’re non-negotiable.

3. Demand a Clear Battery Story

A reliable smart lock should be upfront about power.

Check for:

  • Specific battery life estimates tied to realistic usage
  • Rechargeable options or easy-switch batteries
  • Emergency backups, such as:
    • An external power port for a power bank
    • A mechanical key override
  • Proactive low-battery alerts in the app

If a lock has a reputation for just quietly dying with no warning, that’s a red flag.

4. Minimize Extra Boxes and Hubs

Whenever you can:

  • Prefer built-in Wi‑Fi and Matter support
  • Be cautious about setups that demand yet another bridge or hub unless there’s a really good reason

Fewer devices in the chain usually means fewer things to reset when something goes wrong.

5. Evaluate Guest & Family Access Features

Reliability isn’t only “Does it unlock?” It’s also “Does it fit how we actually live?”

Look for:

  • Time-limited PINs for guests, sitters, or cleaners
  • The ability to pause and resume access without deleting someone
  • Anti-peep protections so you can safely enter a code when someone’s nearby

When these features are well-designed, everyone uses the lock properly instead of propping doors open, sharing permanent codes, or bypassing the system altogether.

Why Lockin’s 2024 Results Matter

Pulling everything together, the 2024 independent testing suggests Lockin didn’t just stack features—they targeted specific, real-world pain points most people have had with smart locks:

  • Swapping fingerprint for palm vein to fix everyday biometric headaches
  • Using a weather-rated exterior and keeping the interior safely indoors to protect critical components
  • Combining a rechargeable battery, smart alerts, emergency power, and key backup to reduce lockout risk
  • Building in Wi‑Fi + Matter so you don’t need an extra hub and your smart home routines stay more predictable

These aren’t just marketing bullets; they’re answers to the reasons people have uninstalled or stopped trusting earlier generations of smart locks.

Conclusion: Turning “Smart Lock Anxiety” into Quiet Confidence

A truly reliable smart lock should almost disappear into your routine. You shouldn’t be standing on your porch wondering:

  • Will my fingerprint work today?
  • Did the battery die while I was out?
  • Is the hub crashed again?
  • Is the lock going to jam in this cold snap?

The 2024 independent reliability testing indicates that the Lockin Veno Go Palm Vein Smart Lock was designed specifically to quiet those worries—with:

  • Touchless, high-accuracy palm vein unlocking
  • Weather-ready exterior hardware and certified durability
  • Long-lasting, rechargeable power plus multiple safety nets
  • Hub-free, Matter-enabled smart home integration

If you’re thinking about upgrading from a traditional deadbolt—or giving smart locks another chance after a bad first experience—Veno Go offers a test-backed, practicality-first option that emphasizes everyday dependability over gimmicks.

Ready to Upgrade with Reliability in Mind?

If you want your next smart lock to be the last one you have to think about:

  • Take a closer look at the Veno Go Palm Vein Smart Lock as a starter-friendly, reliability-first choice.
  • If you’re craving even more features or different styles, compare it with Veno, Veno Plus, and Veno Pro in the broader Veno lineup.
  • Before you buy, double-check your door compatibility, and remember: the interior assembly is meant for indoor conditions only.

Your front door shouldn’t be a daily source of tech anxiety.
Choose a lock that earns your trust one effortless unlock at a time—and let the smart part quietly work in the background where it belongs.