#7 The future of Digital Door Access is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed
The beginning of the year always holds something magical; it makes imagining what could be somewhat easier. We set goals for what the future, and the new year in particular, will bring. The slightly tweaked quote from William Gibson about the unevenly distributed future already being here is, therefore, a really good anchor point for our first blog post in 2026.
Gibson’s famous quote holds a lot of truth for the physical access control world. While for most people, physical keys are still a mundane part of daily life and they don’t spend much time thinking about them, a growing minority is already living a life largely or completely without any metal keys. In fact, the first children in various places around the world are already growing up without ever having used or owned a metal key.
In the digital access community, everyone is right: those saying the future is already here – and those saying it is still the future.
Just looking at our growing KIWI user base, there are a ton of exciting use cases and anecdotes that have already transformed how people open doors and how they conceptualize access. And while keys are not only a really difficult hardware and software problem to solve at scale, they are just as big of a mindset problem to solve for users to adapt to. It is exciting to see that the future of digital door access is already here in a growing number of people’s everyday lives.
To give a few examples from our small but growing KIWI world:
The Efficiency Revolution for Service Providers: There are already thousands of janitors, facility managers, and general real estate service providers in Germany that naturally use our KIWI App with tens, hundreds, and – for some – well above a thousand doors in their pocket. These folks are very often not digital natives, but they very quickly turned into “natural users,” appreciating how much pain relief is found in digital door access. Instead of chasing keys, being stuck in traffic only to open doors for others, or carrying and losing dozens of metal keys, they simply open the door with the push of a button on their phone.
The New Tenant Experience: There are thousands of tenants and families in the multi-family housing context using the KIWI App or KIWI Transponders instead of metal keys – some only for main entrance doors, some for all doors in their buildings. They no longer worry about lost keys or locking themselves out. A growing number of these tenants are naturally granting and revoking access to their own caretakers and no longer worry about handing out metal keys or their kids losing them, with all the associated pain and follow-on costs. And digital access already supports a growing range of additional use cases in the context of multi-family – from the well established student living and kindergarten to more niche use cases like re-integrating homeless people in the housing market through shared living spaces.
The Office, Co-Working, and Community Experience: While offices – especially larger office complexes – have traditionally been faster in adopting card systems for obvious reasons, there is a growing number of offices moving to truly mobile app solutions. There is also increasing momentum among smaller offices, kindergartens, community centers and the likes in moving to digital access as the barriers to planning, installing, and managing a keyless system are greatly reduced. And we continue to love the reaction of KIWI users being in awe after understanding that they can open their co-working office doors, their gym and their private apartment door from the very same KIWI App – with all three places being owned and managed by completely different and unrelated companies.
The Modern Security Partner: There are the first professional locksmiths and larger security companies monitoring a diverse set of customers in one central digital access platform. While most integrators and installers still have to log into specific, mostly on-premise software to manage whatever is needed for a specific customer, the first digital access service providers are enjoying the benefits of our KIWI cloud-based platform. All doors and users for various customers are centrally controlled; everyone uses the same app and portal—while, of course, being fully GDPR compliant. And as a great side effect, this also dramatically reduces the general overhead and training levels and thereby increases the talent pool available to install and manage digital access systems.
We can see these pockets of the future already in a lot of other places, driven by other companies and use cases. Smart lock companies are good examples of the change happening at private doors, as is how people are starting to use their apps for accessing hotels or offices around the world instead of metal keys or cards only.
So, without a doubt, there is still a long way to go. But for everyone who is interested, the future is here. And it’s not in concepts, slides, or at conference panels – it is in everyday people’s everyday lives around the world.
It’s exciting to work together with a growing customer base and a like-minded global community to continuously improve this future and turn it into a reality for a lot more people in 2026 and beyond.
