Use Smart Lock in Android 5.0 and Never Unlock Your Phone at Home Again

Don’t you hate it whenever you’re safely at home, and there’s no one else around to access your phone, and yet you still have to unlock it whenever you want to use it? Android 5.0 Lollipop’s Smart Lock solves that.

Many of you probably know the frustration, you’re listening to something like Pandora or Spotify, and you want to change the station, or give something thumbs down, or bookmark a song — whatever the case, anytime you want to do that, you have to unlock your device. Or, you just want to look something up (OK Google?) or tap out a quick text, or any number of things you do a hundred times a day.

It’s even worse if you’re jogging or otherwise engaged in some vigorous activity. Have you ever tried unlocking your phone when it is in one of those protective exercise cases?

Smart Lock mitigate much of that frustration by letting you set trusted places, where as long as you’re within a certain range, you phone or tablet won’t lock; trusted devices, which will let you assign a Smart Lock to paired Bluetooth or NFC devices; and finally, you can enable trusted face unlocking, which means you can simply turn your device on, look at it and it will unlock, as long as your front-facing camera isn’t obscured.

Turning on Smart Lock

Smart Lock can be set up by accessing the settings. Pull down from the top edge of your device as if you’re going to check your notifications and tap on the gray time/date bar, and then tap the “Settings” gear.

If you don’t already have a phone lock on your device, you should do that before you set up Smart Lock. We use a pattern to unlock our device, but you can use the PIN or password option too.

Regardless, in the settings, tap the “Security” options and then “Smart Lock.”

In the Smart Lock settings, we have three options; trusted devices trusted face, and trusted places. You can have one, or the others, or all at the same time. Smart Lock will allow you to have as many trusted devices as you want, but you can only set up one trusted face.

Home is Where You Don’t Have to Unlock Your Phone

You can also have unlimited trusted places, which is really convenient, and what we want to focus on first.

When you tap on “Trusted places,” you can turn on your Home and Work locations assigned in Google Maps or add a custom place.

When you add a custom place, it will open to your current location, which you can immediately add, or you can search for a location or address and add that. It’s important to understand that this relies heavily on the Google Location service, so if you’ve got your GPS enabled, then custom places will obviously be more precise.

In the following screenshot, we can apparently choose the entire San Antonio metro area as a trusted place by simply tapping the blue bar below the map. Obviously, the idea is to add smaller areas that don’t compromise your device’s overall security, such as a specific business or address.

Here, we’ve elected to add our default home location, which we’ve labeled as such.

As you can see, you can quickly add a variety of custom trusted places that you frequent regularly. As soon as you are in range of a trusted place, the Smart Lock will engage automatically.

Remember, you can also add your Home and Work Google Maps locations? To do that, you must first configure them in Maps by swiping right from the left screen edge and tapping “Settings.”

On the settings pane, tap “Edit home or work.”

Now you can enter your home and work addresses.

You should now be able to turn your work and home address on and off in Smart Lock by tapping the little green button next to each.

Setting up and Using Device Smart Lock

If you want to add a trusted device, such as via Bluetooth, you first need to pair them in the Android Bluetooth settings.

If you already have other devices paired, you can tap “add trusted device.”

On the next screen, tap “Bluetooth” to add a previously paired device.

In this screenshot, we already have several other devices paired, so we can add any of them, and anytime we connect to them, our Smart Lock will activate.

Note, as you pair to Bluetooth devices, a notification will inform you that you can add it as a Smart Lock trusted device.

If you want to set up a Smart Lock using NFC, you simply tap another NFC-enabled device or tag.

Finally, although Smart Lock doesn't have an app lock to lock singles apps, it gives Lollipop users one last nifty feature, which is actually a more refined version of Android’s face unlock feature from previous versions.