Ring's newest smart lock has a backup plan for when the electronics quit: turn a crank.
Ring built a hand crank into the lock itself. When the batteries run out, you turn the crank to generate enough power to unlock the door. There is no app to open, no spare batteries to find, and no keypad code to remember - just physical effort as a last resort when the power is out or the battery finally dies.
Smart locks have always carried an uncomfortable trade-off: convenience now, risk later. A dead battery or an outage can turn a locked door into a real problem, and most existing fixes, like swap-in backup batteries or keypad overrides, still require you to remember to prep for failure in advance. A crank needs no planning and no spare parts, which makes it a rare case of a smart-home company solving a reliability problem with a deliberately low-tech answer.
It will not make headlines like a flashy new app feature, but it is the kind of unglamorous engineering that actually matters when you are standing outside your own front door.