Adding support for Linux/OSX/Windows is probably not a priority for them to get this thing off the ground.

How about, eh, you know... Web based? No need for this platform-specific bullshit.

Last I heard Google was pretty good at creating good web applications.

Perhaps it uses some local comms to bootstrap it. Like Bluetooth or sound waves.

Yes, it says somewhere on the site that it uses soundwaves to share the initial key with your device.

But that's NOT an excuse to make the device depend on the Mobile ecosystem.

If it can play a code on the speaker, it can just talk. In English. Via thirty-six audio files: a.wav, b.wav, ... 9.wav. Ok, thirty-seven recordings--can't forget welcome_to_your_new_router_your_key_is.wav. :)

I'd wager that whatever they're doing, it's far more reliable than reading out English letters and doing speech recognition on it. Accomplishing the key exchange might not have been reliable in all browsers.

... I meant, let the device speak directly to the user. "Your key is alpha nine hotel victor ..."

The goal was some sort of manual setup.

Humans are good at speech recognition. We've been doing it for thousands of years.

> Is that what you really want? A wifi AP that can be configured from the web?

Uh. Yes. In fact anything else is a deal-breaker to me and I regularly buy $300+ routers.

> Because THAT's how you get hacked.

If the router admin-interface is a POS written by the same rails-developers who leave delete operations on GET links, sure. I don't though, and I think the OpenWRT developers would take offence at such a blanket-statement like that.

But let's take your statement at face value: Web-based interfaces are inherently unsafe. Should we shut down all web-applications then? Should web shut the entire web down? That's the logical end of your extreme line of thought after all.