Shepherd Lock 4+

Looks like there wasn’t any user testing done prior to rolling out the latest version.
Both my iPad and iPhone are on the latest iOS releases. App crashes immediately after opening it rendering the lock useless at the moment

My lock doesn’t work, I can’t login to the app, can’t reset my password and customer support never responds. Won’t buy this again. I wish I could return it.

I ordered the Shepherd lock from what was then PassiveBolt back in late 2019 as it was supposed to be out in the first quarter of 2020. I did not receive the lock until a few months ago, well over a year late. I still have not received the Wi-Fi adapter that I also had paid for.

The only distinguishing feature is the touch of the front door. That works very sporadically at best. And when it does I almost always have to take my phone out of my pocket. If I’m going to take my phone out of my pocket I could’ve just as easily taken my key out. Likewise, I could have gotten an August lock that works through their app that way and is *much* faster, quieter, reliable and cheaper.

Even when I am using the app with my iPhone in my hand their app is very slow to connect and very slow to open. It is also very loud.

I have been getting “tunnel” errors a lot and wrote them several weeks ago about this and asked them what the tunnel was. I never received a response.

With the latest update to iOS 14.6 it is now crashing 80-90% of the time I push to lock or unlock the door. While that release only came out a few days ago I would have felt as a developer they would have access to a beta version to prevent these problems.

Frankly, if the touch sensor doesn’t work reliably *and* quickly with my phone in my pocket, then there’s no point of getting this lock As I said before, you can get an August lock that also does not need to change the outside lock and works very quickly, very quietly and virtually 100% of the time from my experience with my son’s second generation August lock.

Shepherd has been making improvements over the last few weeks, so hopefully they will get this worked out. But their customer support stinks as they don’t have a phone number and quit answering my emails weeks ago. Even when they push updates they never send us any information about what the update did. There is now something called the “Back Drive“ setting, and it has a sensitivity setting but I have no idea what it does. I also only found out about the new sensitivity setting for the door openeren/ajar feature when I happened to stumble on it, not because they ever sent me an email or posted anything about that, despite my reporting the problems I was having with it.

So, hopefully this thing will get better and work, (and I’ll get my Wi-Fi module someday), but as it is I can’t imagine why anybody would pay more for this then, say, an August lock.

Oh, one last thing: before I got my lock I saw they had already announced version two which was going to include Z-Wave. I asked if I could hold off and get that instead because I now have a Z-Wave hub (Hubitat). They said they would not do that. So for being over a year late, and still not getting the Wi-Fi module, that is how they treat their original customers.