August Wi-Fi Smart Lock: Two Prices, an Out-of-Stock Button, and a Change of Owner

August's homepage promotes this lock at 229.99 dollars while its own product page shows 199.99 and no stock. In the US it is a Fortune Brands product now, not an ASSA ABLOY one.

We checked august.com twice on 1 September 2026 and got two different answers. The homepage promotes the Wi-Fi Smart Lock at 229.99 dollars with 25 percent off and no stock warning. The product page for the same lock shows 199.99 dollars, a Labor Day discount code, and an out-of-stock state in the purchase widget. Yale’s own store lists it at 199.99 dollars, also out of stock, with a notify-me button. There is no end-of-life notice on any of those pages. But a lock that two first-party stores will not sell you is not a recommendation, whatever the homepage banner says.

The manufacturer never called it a 4th generation

Before anything else, the model name. August’s own product page is titled simply August Wi-Fi Smart Lock and uses no generation wording anywhere. The 4th Generation label that appears in retail listings and review headlines, including the Android Police review this article draws on, is press and retail shorthand rather than an August designation. If you are trying to match a review to the box in front of you, generation numbers will not help.

What the product is: a retrofit lock that mounts over an existing deadbolt and keeps the outside hardware and your existing keys. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are built in, so it needs no separate bridge. It ships with DoorSense, a door-position sensor that distinguishes a locked door from a locked-and-actually-closed door. August claims up to three months of battery life. Launch price was 200 dollars.

In the United States this is a Fortune Brands lock

A great deal of published writing about this lock says August is part of ASSA ABLOY. In the US market that has been wrong since the middle of 2023. ASSA ABLOY sold the United States and Canadian Yale and August residential smart-lock businesses to Fortune Brands Innovations for 800 million dollars, or 700 million net of tax benefits, in a deal that also included Emtek and Schaub. It was announced on 2 December 2022 and completed on 19 June 2023, per the Business Wire announcement. The acquired businesses carried around 350 million dollars of 2021 revenue.

Why it happened is the part worth knowing. CE Pro reported that ASSA ABLOY divested under Department of Justice antitrust pressure arising from its 4.3 billion dollar purchase of Spectrum Brands’ Hardware and Home Improvement business, and that ASSA ABLOY said the sale fully eliminated all competitive concerns alleged by the DOJ. So the brand was not sold because someone wanted it; it was sold because a regulator required a seller.

Outside the US and Canada, Yale remains an ASSA ABLOY business, which makes the split geographic rather than clean. august.com is branded as part of Yale and Yale Access devices can be managed from the August app, but no page we fetched states a sunset date for the August brand or a migration date for the August app. That silence is not reassurance; it just means nothing has been announced.

Three months of batteries and no keypad in the box

Android Police scored the lock 8 out of 10 on 16 March 2024 and still recommended against buying it at list price, calling it a reasonable purchase at around 150 dollars and advising against the full retail price of 200 dollars and above. The specific limitations behind that judgement are all things you live with daily rather than benchmark figures.

Two CR123 batteries are rated for only about three months. The lock is 2.4GHz Wi-Fi only, and the reviewer notes that battery life degrades further at the edge of network range, so the door furthest from your router is the one that will need attention. It is bulky at 2.8 by 1.8 inches on the inside of the door. Nothing in the box provides a keypad or biometric backup, which means a flat battery or a dropped connection leaves you with a physical key and nothing else. And the reviewer’s own warped door defeated auto-lock entirely, which is a useful reminder that a retrofit lock inherits every fault of the door it is fitted to.

The 2019 flaw that leaked the Wi-Fi password, not the door

Bitdefender documented CVE-2019-17098 in a post published on 10 August 2020 and updated on 20 May 2021. The encryption key used between the August Smart Lock and its configuration app was hardcoded, which allowed an attacker in wireless range to eavesdrop on setup, intercept the home Wi-Fi password and, in Bitdefender’s words, mount additional attacks against the home network. The August Smart Lock and the Connect Wi-Fi Bridge were both affected.

Bitdefender is explicit about the limit of the flaw: it would not have let an attacker unlock the door. That is the correct framing, and it is also not nothing, because a smart lock that hands over the credentials to your entire network is a security product creating a security problem. The precise firmware versions affected, the disclosure-to-patch timeline and the CVSS score are not stated in a source we could retrieve, so we are not going to characterise how quickly August responded.

The alternatives August itself points at

Matter is absent here, and conspicuously so. August’s page does not mention it, and Yale’s own store page for this lock confirms Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and HomeKit while noting that Yale’s separate Smart Lock with Matter does support the standard. What you do get is Apple HomeKit and Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant, both of the latter requiring Wi-Fi, and working Home Assistant support. There is no Thread and no Z-Wave. Paying 200 dollars in 2026 for a lock without Matter, from a company that will happily sell you one with it, needs a better reason than brand familiarity.

August’s newer retrofit lock is the Yale Approach Lock with Wi-Fi at 129.99 dollars, which August describes as its newest and most affordable smart lock, 25 percent smaller than the August Smart Lock and aimed at renters and first-time buyers. August does not present it as a replacement for the Wi-Fi Smart Lock, and it was also out of stock on 1 September 2026. What was actually purchasable from august.com that day was a shorter list.

• Smart Lock with Connect, 210.99 dollars
• Yale Keypad Touch, 119.99 dollars, marked as new
• Valdosta Lever, 29.99 dollars

Who this leaves in a reasonable position

If you already own an August Wi-Fi Smart Lock, keep it. Nothing above is a reason to replace working hardware, and the ownership change does not affect a lock that runs over your own Wi-Fi.

If you are shopping this week, do not wait for stock. A device promoted on a homepage while both first-party stores refuse the sale is a device in an unclear state, and no announcement exists to clarify it. Buy a lock with Matter and a keypad instead, and if you want to stay in this family, note that August’s own answer to entry-level buyers is a different 129.99 dollar product it has not positioned as a successor to anything.

Sources: August · Android Police · Bitdefender · Business Wire · CE Pro