ugh, no. an out of power phone is not the same thing as lost keys. in decades of traveling i never once lost my keys, but my phone is out of power almost every time after i spend a day away from home or office.
> If you knew that you needed phone charge to enter your apartment I bet you'd bring a spare battery pack when you went out.
Re-read please out loud :
"If you knew that you needed phone charge to enter your apartment I bet you'd bring a spare battery pack when you went out."
I'll have you know that I read all of my posts out loud several times before submitting them. Otherwise I wouldn't be sure if they were up to HN's high standards.
Having not read UBIK, I'm not sure what exactly you were going for by comparing having to keep your phone charged to "a deeply unsettling existential horror story, a nightmare you'll never be sure you've woken up from"[0].
I genuinely do not see how being required to manage a phone's battery is any more onerous a requirement to place on someone than keeping track of a key. People are used to doing both already, and of course I'm not suggesting that it would be acceptable to remove existing fallback measure like resetting locks in the event of a lost key/phone.
[0]: Grossman, Lev. "Ubik–All-Time 100 Novels". Time. (via Wikipedia)
really? you can predict how much you use your phone during the day? my key will never loose power, people calling me is something i can't control.
and control is the problem here. i can control that i will not loose my key. just as i can control that i will not loose my phone. and while i know that usually i can get through the day with a single charge, i can't predict that one day a year where that charge won't be enough. so just because of this unpredictability i have to go out carrying a backpack just so i can carry a powerbank. because my phone fits in my pockets, an extra powerbank requires me to have some kind of bag, in summer when i want to go out with shorts and a t-shirt. oh and what about my off-grid weekend trips where i don't get an opportunity to charge my phone for two days?
also, what about my kids who are to young to have a phone on their own?
requiring a phone severely affects my lifestyle in ways that i just don't want.
but i just realized what the solution to the power management is: every door that requires a phone needs to have a charger station right next to it. only that would really solve the problem of being able to make sure i can have a charged phone when i need to enter.
that still doesn't solve the other problems, but at least i can leave the powerbank at home now
What if you drop the phone and break the screen?
i have yet to find a powerbank that small. though if such a powerbank existed it would actually help because it would not be able to carry more charge than what is needed to unlock the door. it wouldn't be useful for much else.
RFID seems like the perfect building access system to me. You can disable individual key fobs (whereas with metal keys you have to rekey the locks each time someone moves out) and they're cheap to replace.
I definitely wouldn't mind having the option to use my phone, but it just isn't a good single point of failure. Software is nice and everything, but not nice enough to control access to my home.