Hi all, I was told to ask here so it could be followed up on…
My phone doesn’t have bluetooth, so I was wondering about acquiring a key fob or hid card. A couple people mentioned some difficulty with that but suggested that I follow up with a post here so that maybe we can strategize a solution.
I haven’t tried it yet, but according to the OpenPath manual lack of Bluetooth on your phone only prevents you from unlocking by tapping your phone on the reader. Clicking the lock icon in the app should still work.
If I remember, I’ll experiment with that next time I’m at the shop. In the meantime, I’m curious about anyone else’s experience with it.
I admittedly haven’t tried it at the shop itself with Bluetooth turned off, but I think Bluetooth is still required for the push to unlock to work. This is because “remote unlock” is disabled in the app. I guess it needs Bluetooth to detect proximity. Maybe Wi-Fi would work too though.
Yeah, we know “remote unlock” is a separate permission, but the manual didn’t say anything about it being required for manual unlock without Bluetooth when on-site. I’m just guessing it’s faster to determine functionality empirically than to ask customer service 
That’s fair! Probably easier to just try it out than keep guessing
I can confirm that I did empirically test and find that without BLE permissions it will not unlock the door.
I’m going to ask again if there is any real security threat to enabling “Remote Unlock” on everybody by default. Even if someone unlocks it remotely, they are logged, no?
I find that OpenPath has at least halved my phone’s battery life. I’d really like to get that back. The easiest way would be for me to deny BLE permissions to OpenPath and just use Remote Unlock.
Alternatively, I guess we could have people individually ask you for “Remote Unlock” permission, but that’s going to be kind of annoying.
Thanks for the empirical evidence. Guess its time to get the physical fob access figured out. It’s strange that you’ve noticed such an impact on battery life – I haven’t noticed a thing, personally. I’m not sure if it makes a difference, but I tend to close the app completely (rather than letting it run in the background) when I am not planning on accessing the shop. When I book a time or when I get there, I open it and it works while I’m there, then I close it again when I leave. Maybe that could help?
Agreed - I don’t see how the app would have a noticeable impact on battery life if you don’t have the background service enabled. It works fine for me too in this mode. I just launch the app when I walk up to the door and it stays running for a while; maybe on a more heavily-loaded phone the task killer would be more aggressive at nuking OP.
Remote unlock will not be turned on by default. Yes, it is a risk and poses the same enforcement struggles we already experience when something goes awry – we may have the records but we don’t have enough people willing to search through them and enforce. It is not something we will entertain as a default for all members.
@SunriseMaker – for members that don’t use the OP app, we have fobs available for purchase here.
@Jon The background service re-enables itself every single time I pop open the app and then I have to manually kill it afterward. If I block that service, I can’t get in because it thinks I’m doing Remote Unlock. Are you doing something special?
I don’t think so – When I first set up the app I enabled the background service so I could use the “wave to unlock” feature, and I had the “OpenPath Service…blahblah” always in my system tray.
I later disabled the background service option. The thing in the system tray is gone, and now I can only unlock doors when I launch the app first. They show up in the OP log as either 1FA or 2FA onsite touch unlocks; I think that indicates whether the phone was unlocked when I did it (the second factor is phone PIN or biometric)
I didn’t try taking adb logs to see if the service was truly dead, but contemporary Android is typically aggressive about preventing apps from running forever without a visable/annoying UI indication and every time I come back to the shop I have to launch the app again.
I do have location permission enabled and Bluetooth on.
@valerie I had no idea we could even purchase fobs. I have ordered one, that’s perfectly fine from my point of view.
I later disabled the background service option.
Hmm. That sounds like something in the OpenPath application that I missed. I’ll try to hunt that down and see how it works.
it’s under the hamburger menu. Turn off “Enable Openpath Service” under “settings”
Most excellent! Thank you all!
