phone widget for the non-tech parent

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Stefan

• July 22, 2023 19:46

I love my Firewalla but am very sceptical when it comes to giving my wife admin access to it. Plus, she doesn't really want to anyway. What she does want is being able to change some internet rules for the kids (i.e. when it switches on/off) and enable the social hour.

Can't the Android app (and iPhone too I suppose) have a widget that would allow non-technical users to switch certain features on or off? Or perhaps a completely stripped down version of the normal app with just a few functions available?

You say Cyber Security Simple & Powerful. However, slowly but surely your product is getting more and more advanced and becomes too difficult for the basic user. 

When looking at the Social Hour button, it says "One tap to block all online social networking activities for one hour". However, it takes two clicks to get there in the first place (if you know where to find it) and another click to switch it on. Why not have a widget to toggle it on/off?

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  Support Team

  • July 24, 2023 11:59
  • Edited

  @Stefan

  Thanks for the feedback. Having a shortcut to help toggle things on/off is actually a feature on our to-do list, but not specific to Social Hour though.

  If we create something that allows you to add any of your rules to the box's mainscreen, so you can easily pause/resume them from there, do you think that will be useful to you? Or are you referring to the system-level widgets, like the ones on the iOS home screen that can be interacted with without opening the Firewalla app? 

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  Clayton Crocker

  • August 11, 2023 13:55

  I think this would be a great option.

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  Stefan

  • August 15, 2023 22:26

  Sorry for the delayed reply.
  I'm not too familiar with iOS - I'm an Android user :-)

  I think a widget to toggle rules would be very useful. Equally though, I think it is important to keep in mind why Firewalla was designed in the first place: "something simple to use" and "cyber security for family" (&business). In other words: when developing this, make it user friendly for the average family, not the tech savvy dad in the family :-)

  When I'm away for work and my wife wants to block or unblock the internet usage for the kids at home, she currently calls me up and from the other side of the planet I need to deactivate rules on our Firewalla. And don't get me wrong, it works perfectly well. But the point is that she should be able to do this herself, without having to login to the router, seeing info about flows, graphs, routes, servers... she doesn't care about it. All she wants is to unblock the internet for the kids.

  So if you can make that happen, I think Firewalla will become a lot more family friendly which I think will work well with your customer base. Just my two cents :-)

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