Experts say the reason lies in how Koreans live: mostly in large apartment complexes built to the same specifications, and in a rental market where tenants come and go often.
Ha Jae-hong, founder and CEO of iRevo, the maker of Gateman digital door locks, in a photo taken on Jan. 30, 2007JOONGANG ILBO
How the traditional key disappeared
The keypad on almost every Korean front door traces back to a thief who used copied keys.
While working as a software engineer at Daewoo Electronics' central research lab, Ha Jae-hong read a news story about a woman in her 50s who was arrested after stealing about 500 million won ($372,000) from upscale saunas in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, using copied keys. She had used the money to send her three children abroad to study.
The story gave Ha an idea: a lock whose code changes every time it opens, so that a copied key would be worthless.
He founded a company in 1997 to build it. In 2001, it was renamed iRevo, the maker of the Gateman lock.
In 2004, the industry estimated that about 18 percent of Korean homes had a digital lock and projected that the share would reach 51.4 percent by 2006. Most newly built apartments were already installing them.
The locks were expensive at first, and older rental housing held on to keys for a while.
"Until around 2004, 2005, 2006, a lot of the studio apartments near universities still had keys," said Lee Eun-hyung, a research fellow at the Korea Research Institute for Construction Policy. "Roughly speaking, [digital locks] spread widely from the 2010s, even to ordinary houses."
Prices fell as the locks spread.
"The cheap ones got really cheap — under 100,000 won, some for just tens of thousands of won — so there's no burden in terms of price," Lee said.
Lee also pointed to the Korean temperament.
"We Koreans are a bit impatient, and [we] don't like inconvenience," Lee said. Compared with digging through a bag or pocket for a key, then sticking it in a lock and turning it, a code or a card tap is simply easier.
Even the keypad is starting to go.
Property platform Zigbang's Haven lock, released in 2025, has no number keypad at all — the company says it was the first in Korea to drop it. It opens with face recognition or a phone app, which can also issue temporary passwords.
Apartment complexes in Seoul seen from Namsan, a mountain in central Seoul, on Oct. 5NEWS1
"Korean apartments are a highly standardized form of housing that supplies anywhere from several hundred to several thousand units at once with set specifications," said Jung Heon-mok, a professor of anthropology at the Academy of Korean Studies who has studied Korean apartment complexes. "So once a particular fixture is adopted, it can quickly settle in as a kind of 'standard feature.'"
How firmly Koreans now expect a keypad became clear this summer.
In July, Hoban Construction opened a model home for a new apartment complex in Gimpo, Gyeonggi, where residents are scheduled to move in in 2030. A model home is a full-size show unit that Korean builders set up so buyers can see an apartment years before it is built.
Visitors found that the front doors came with a standard key lock. Complaints spread on online communities and on Blind, an anonymous app for office workers.
"Does it make sense to use keys in an apartment people move into in 2030?" one post asked.
The complex's recruitment notice said a mechanical lock would be installed by default to keep the front fire doors fire-resistant, as required by law. Hoban said buyers could switch to a digital lock at no extra cost.
Jung said the complaints were less about practicality than about what a key lock signals.
"In new apartments, various fixtures go beyond their simple functions and become markers that show the apartment's newness and value as a product," Jung said. "So I think this backlash stems more from a symbolic sense of incongruity — 'Why is a device from the past going into a new apartment we'll move into in 2030?' — than from the inconvenience of using a key."
Pedestrians walk through a Seoul neighborhood packed with villas, or low-rise multifamily houses, on July 20, 2023.NEWS1
Easy for renters
Korea's rental market also helped.
Many tenants rent on a jeonse basis, paying a large lump-sum deposit instead of monthly rent, or on a monthly rent basis, and move when their contracts end.
"For landlords, sometimes the previous tenant doesn't return the key, or says [they] lost it. Then you have to change the lock," Lee said. "But with a keypad, you don't have to change anything. When someone moves out, you just set a new [code]. So it's convenient for renting too."
"Being able to simply change the password, without making new keys or replacing the lock, is very practical," Jung said.
Online retailer Coupang lets customers save the lobby code in their delivery address book.SCREEN CAPTURE
Locks have also become a way to let people in without anyone being home.
Many apartment buildings also have a shared lobby door with its own code. Residents often share that code with delivery services so couriers can bring parcels straight to their front door.
In one case aired on a radio legal advice program in September, a woman said that after she changed the code to stop her mother-in-law from dropping in unannounced, her husband gave his mother the new one.
Door locks sold on AliExpress after a fire test by the Korea Consumer Agency in February 2025KOREA CONSUMER AGENCY
Safer than a key?
For many Koreans, the move away from keys was also about safety.
"If you just use keys, [someone] can copy them, and the chance of [them] being misused in crimes goes up," Lee said. "In the past, women who rented a new place were told to change the lock. Since digital door locks came out, there's none of that."
Jung said it is not that Koreans care more about security than other people do.
"It's not so much that Koreans are especially sensitive about security, but that security in apartments has developed as a system," Jung said.
In Korean complexes, the main gate, security guard booths, CCTV, shared lobby doors and each unit's front door work together as one system. "[Security devices] create the impression of 'a safely managed complex,' and that becomes an indicator of the quality of housing or the standing of the complex," Jung said.
Jung cited the idea of the "aesthetics of security" from anthropologist Teresa Caldeira. In this view, walls and electronic security devices protect residents, but they also signal the residents' social status.
"Security equipment provides safety while also becoming a kind of symbol that visually expresses how well-managed, modern and valuable a residential space is," Jung said. "This tendency developed especially strongly in Korean apartments."
Hacking is the other worry.
In 2021, a hacker broke into the central servers and wall pads — the in-home panels that also control door locks — at 638 apartment complexes, covering 404,847 households, and secretly filmed inside homes through the panels’ cameras. The hacker, a security specialist who had tried to sell the footage online, was arrested in 2022.
Keyrings hang from people’s bags near Hongik University Station in western Seoul on March 24, 2025.JOONGANG ILBO
The key is gone. The keyring isn't.
Koreans may have stopped carrying keys, but the keyring survived as a fashion accessory.
It has become a must-have for adults who decorate their bags.
People buy them for different reasons, from matching keyrings for couples to simply because they are cute. Many shop for them at stationery chain Artbox, discount store Daiso or pop-up stores.
According to Artbox, sales of keyrings rose 180 percent in 2022 compared with the previous year. Sales have more than doubled every year since.
Luxury brands including Louis Vuitton, Prada, Miu Miu, Coach and Fendi have since started selling keyrings as lower-priced entry products.
“[Decorating keyrings is] one way for young consumers to express their identity, individuality and uniqueness,” said Lee Eun-hee, a professor emeritus of consumer science at Inha University.
