> I've never understood why keypad locks haven't been more widely adopted in the West

They have been adopted widely. In businesses. It's mostly a perception issue, where such locks are perceived as a product for a business.

That said, it's a lot more convenient to walk up to a door and have it unlock automatically because it detects your phone ... than to stand there and enter a code.

In my experience, they are not common in many businesses either.

As for the convenience factor, it might be more convenient, but I don't think it's a lot more convenient to have Lockitron instead of a conventional keypad lock. Unless Lockitron can also automatically open/close the door for you, I just don't see the difference as being that great.

In any case, I think the real business opportunity lies in figuring out how to market keypad locks to a broader audience.

In American business over the past decade, I've experienced an order of magnitude more RFID-detector door locks than keypad door locks. Get your badge/wallet/purse/backpack within a few inches of the detector and you are in.

That is definitely the trend, because it allows security to give each authorized person a unique access credential, which in turn allows access to be selectively granted or revoked. When I worked in secure environments keypad locks were a pain in the ass, because every time someone's access to an area was revoked the code had to be changed.

(You could give everyone their own code. 4 digits still allows a few dozen people their own number while still leaving most of the search space open.)

Yeah, but that requires giving the locks brains, at which point you might was well just embed an RFID tag in everyone's badge. We had some areas that required both a badge swipe and a PIN.

In my case, they'd just need to drop the price. We have rented rooms, so keypads would be a great fit, but it's hard to justify the extra cost.

It may be a local issue, though, I'm not in the US, and shipping is usually not cheap.

In Europe they're very common

Europe's a big place. I don't think I've ever seen one in a residential home here in Portugal, nor in the parts of Spain I know.

True, I generalized, they're very popular in France

I don't remember seeing them in Germany

Do they have them on the apartment doors, or just in the main building door like in Budapest? If the latter, it doesn't really replace Lockitron.

It depends, mostly on the main building door

But there are models that are made to go on an apartment door/main door.

However, they don't usually replace the whole lock, but are there for authorized people to go during business hours

Yeah, not really a replacement for Lockitron