Project overview

Yale's long-standing tradition of lock manufacturing, combined with the innovative spirit of August, has paved the way to a leading position in the smart home industry. Yale’s journey began with Linus Yale's small lock shop where the founder created his first lock technology, which was one of the industry's earliest innovations. Similarly, August, founded in San Francisco in November 2012 by Yves Béhar and Jason Johnson, has always been at the forefront of smart lock innovation.

The dedication of August and Yale to advance home security has resulted in the sale of over three million smart devices.

Since joining forces with Fortune Brands Innovations in 2023, Yale and August have been well-positioned to tackle their robust product roadmap and find new opportunities to innovate. Facing the need for a swift market launch of their anticipated 2023 and 2024 product line, Yale and August extended their expertise through a strategic collaboration with Transcenda.

What we did

Native Android Yale Access app development

Native iOS Yale Access app development

Android Yale Access mobile SDK

Project management

Product management

Takeaways & results

With an ambitious roadmap facing Yale and August, expanded expertise and resources helped achieve the desired business outcomes. Transcenda's expertise in the smart home sector laid a solid foundation to help Yale and August augment their capacity and achieve their business objectives while delivering to market on time and on budget.

A key objective was to enhance usability, user experience, and application performance. To this end, Transcenda’s engineering team designed and implemented an updated replacement for the Yale Access Android mobile SDK. The new SDK led to significant improvements in Bluetooth/WiFi connectivity, firmware OTA update efficiency, and support for multiple concurrent device connections.

Project outcomes

Streamlined development

The transformation allowed for a unified device communication SDK that could be deployed within the primary application and offered to partners, optimizing the development cycle and reducing associated costs

Reduced OTA update times

The firmware update process for devices, like Pandora, saw a remarkable reduction in time, down from 7 minutes to just 2 minutes and 40 seconds.

Enhanced device connectivity

The new BLE layer introduced the capability for simultaneous connections with multiple devices, expanding the system's capabilities.

Improved user experience

Improvements in Bluetooth/WiFi connectivity and app-to-device communication reliability directly addressed key user concerns, significantly improving the end-user experience.