Ring has spent years owning the front porch. Its video doorbells and cameras are fixtures of suburban America, but the front door itself — the lock — was always missing from the lineup. That changed this week when Amazon’s Ring brand announced its first-ever smart lock, the Ring Smart Lock, at $250 with a trick no competitor can match: a hand crank that powers the lock when its battery dies.
Ring finally enters the smart lock market
It is a surprising gap in retrospect. Ring dominates entry-point security with its doorbells and cameras, and it already knows how to move homeowners through a purchase funnel for everything around the front door. Yet until now the company had never shipped a smart lock, leaving that segment to players like Yale, Schlage, August, and, more recently, Aqara — whose U600 smart lock with Apple Home Key launched for UK doors just days ago.
The Ring Smart Lock arrives early in 2027 with no exact date confirmed yet, and shoppers can sign up for a notification when it goes on sale. It will come in three finishes — black, silver, and brass — and slots directly into the Ring ecosystem: it works with the Ring app and responds to Alexa voice commands, alongside its built-in entry methods.
The hand crank: how the backup works
A dead smart lock battery is one of the category’s oldest frustrations. Most locks answer it with compromises: a physical key you still have to carry, a 9V battery you press against emergency contacts (who carries one?), or a USB-C port that needs a cable and a power bank you probably don’t have on hand.
Ring’s answer is mechanical. A small dial on the exterior body of the lock generates electricity when you turn it by hand, producing enough power to wake the lock so you can enter your PIN or scan your fingerprint. Picture the scenario the company’s launch materials leaned on: you come home from a long vacation and find the battery dead. Instead of hunting for a spare key, you turn the dial until the keypad lights up and walk in.
The practical appeal is real. Kids coming home from school, family members who never remember to charge anything, and anyone who has ever dug through a drawer for a 9V battery will recognize the problem being solved. Whether a hand crank proves more reliable in the field than a simple physical key remains an open question — and one that will have to wait for real-world testing — but as an answer to “what if the battery dies,” it is the most user-friendly option the category has produced.
Four ways in, no batteries to replace
The lock offers four entry methods:
- Capacitive fingerprint scanner for quick biometric entry.
- Backlit physical keypad supporting PIN codes, including temporary codes for guests, cleaners, or dog walkers.
- Ring app control and management on your phone.
- Alexa voice commands, tying the lock into Amazon’s smart home routines — lock up at bedtime, check status from the couch, or fold the lock into away-from-home automations.
Power comes from a removable Quick Release Ultra battery pack that pops out of the lock and recharges at home, so there are no disposable batteries to swap. That keeps the dead-battery story consistent: in normal life the pack gets recharged like a phone; in the worst case the crank bails you out.
What Ring still hasn’t said
The announcement left several important questions unanswered. Ring has not published battery life estimates, so nobody knows how often the Quick Release Ultra pack will need recharging. Matter compatibility is unconfirmed — a meaningful gap in a market where cross-platform support increasingly decides whether a lock works with your chosen ecosystem. Third-party smart home integrations beyond Alexa and the Ring app are also unclear, as is exactly how much cranking is required to generate a working charge.
Those details matter. A $250 lock competes directly with established options from Yale and Schlage, and with the wave of Matter-ready locks from brands like Aqara. Ring’s ecosystem lock-in is both its advantage and its risk: it will feel effortless if you already live in the Ring app, and less compelling if you don’t.
What it means for Ring’s ecosystem
The lock did not arrive alone. Amazon’s hardware event also refreshed Ring’s camera line with a Retinal 4K series — covering the Outdoor Cam 4K Plus, Spotlight Cam 4K Plus, Floodlight Cam 4K Plus, and Indoor Cam 4K — plus a Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam 2K that swivels 360 degrees with automated subject tracking. Taken together, the message is that Ring wants to be a full perimeter system: cameras to watch the approach, a doorbell to announce visitors, and now a lock to grant entry, all in one app.
That matters because the competitive pressure is rising from an unexpected direction. Apple just entered Ring’s core categories with its HomeView smart display and a co-developed LG lineup of cameras, a video doorbell, and a smart lock. Ring’s advantage is an installed base of millions of cameras and doorbells — hardware Apple cannot conjure overnight. A first-party lock that ties into that base, with a genuinely novel answer to the dead-battery problem, is a smart defensive move.
Still, caution is warranted. Pre-announced hardware with an “early 2027” window has a habit of slipping, and the hand crank — clever as it is — needs independent testing to prove it holds up over years of weather, grime, and daily use. If Ring nails the details, though, the Ring Smart Lock could become the easiest recommendation for anyone already in the Ring and Alexa world. Watch this space when the first units land.