What's the Firewalla strategic plan for unified local management?

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Derek Seaman

• December 28, 2022 18:08
• Edited

I'm new to Firewalla (Gold Plus) and so far mostly loving the overall feature set (and community support) but the management experience seems fragmented. You have the mobile apps and my.firewalla.com dashboard for the average home user. I saw the MSP portal screenshots, and that looks great for multi-device/site management. 

I have used many "pro-sumer" firewalls in the past like OPNsense, Ubiquiti Edgerouter, etc. Those solutions had a built-in web server for local management through any browser, which was great. You could also SSH in for some tasks, but 98% of what people generally wanted to do was via the local management webpage. 

Firewalla seems to be taking a mobile-first approach to management. If I had to fully manage my Gold plus through the iPhone app I'd go crazy with the small screen. Thankfully I have an Apple Silicon Mac so I can run the Firewalla iPad app on my Mac, which makes the experience semi-passable. 

Now I'm all for great mobile apps to manage a device so I'm not saying don't do mobile apps. The initial install using BT/QR code and mobile app makes perfect sense. But I'm not understanding the rationale behind the lack of a generic local web management interface that replicates 99% of the mobile app feature set for ongoing use of the product. Even a cheap $75 GL.iNET travel router has a fully featured local management webpage. 

Strategically is Firewalla going to replicate the app management feature set into a locally hosted webpage? Or is the plan to just be mobile first (and MSP), and "leave out" the average home user with one Firewalla that wants full local web management from a desktop? 

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  Dave scott

  • January 10, 2023 02:42

  I would also like to see improvements on the web interface (including login method) Everything that can be done in the app should be available in the web interface as well. It be nice if it was a local web interface as well.

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  Steve Daniels

  • January 13, 2023 21:09

  I'm keen to see development of the web interface to reach feature parity.  It would be great to see a development platform used that allowed a single effort to provide both interfaces.

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  Orion22

  • January 30, 2023 19:23

  Agreed. Feature parity for the web interface would be super helpful. The app is great for quick changes, but more advanced configuration is much easier to do at a computer with a larger screen. 

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  Herbert Smith

  • March 24, 2023 21:42

  I agree that we need a full blown web interface that can do 99% of things.   Phone are too small to read.  My fingers are too fat to work well on a phone.   I need a PC Web UI to be able to work efficiently.

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