Help

Contact Us

Contact us at support@focusfirewall.com for customer support, feedback, questions or anything else.

Please check Frequently Asked Questions and Troubleshooting to see if there is already a solution for your problem without having to wait to hear back from us.

Frequently Asked Questions

Coming soon

Troubleshooting

Focus Firewall comes with a built-in troubleshooting tool to help figure out what might not be working with the network setup.

To open the tool, go to Settings > Advanced > Open troubleshooting as shown below.

Here are the most common issues and solutions below.

• Unable to start – Focus Firewall attempts to start but changes back to stopped
• Permissions – the network extension is waiting for your permission. This is typically done during onboarding but sometimes people skip it.

Solutions

Restart your computer

Sometimes your Mac may need to be restarted to complete the network extension installation. We automatically detect this scenario, and we'll show you a message if that's the case.

Reset onboarding

Go to Settings > Advanced > Reset and select Reset onboarding, open Focus Firewall main window and do the onboarding from scratch again.

In the Network Setup step, make sure to follow the instructions and grant permissions when asked by the system

Review permissions

Focus Firewall uses a network extension in order to filter distracting websites and you need to grant it permissions in your Mac for it to work properly.

This is typically done during onboarding – you are asked to start Focus Firewall for the first time. Your Mac should show the following popup, which you should click on Open System Settings.

Once you are in the system settings, you must click on "Allow" as shown below:

Once that's done, your Mac presents you with yet another popup to grant the network extension permission to filter network content. We need this permission in order to identify which websites are being accessed and block them in case they are distractions. Please click "Allow" to continue.

Your privacy is of utmost importance, so here's a quick summary of how it works and how we use this data.

1. Focus Firewall uses a network extension and a content filter to identify and block websites.
2. Focus Firewall only uses official APIs provided by Apple and macOS that are designed for this use-case.
3. Your traffic data never leaves your computer. All processing is done locally.
4. When handling your data, we only use the data to identify websites and block. The data is not used for any other purpose.
5. Identified website names are not kept, collected or sent anywhere, except for the "Recently Blocked" feature, where the last few websites blocked are kept in a local database in your computer and displayed in the Content Insights area on the app's main window. Still, they are not collected nor sent to any cloud, and we never see these.
6. Aggregate metrics, such as total websites blocked, may be collected anonymously if you have consented to Anonymous Usage Data. We use this data to inform our product development.
7. Please refer to our Privacy Policy for a complete overview.

Force reactivation

In rare scenarios, the network extension installation gets to a stuck state and stops working. If you tried everything else, this is the last resort and should be able to fix any issues.

1. Open the troubleshooting tool on Settings > Advanced > Open troubleshooting.
2. In the tool, scroll down and click on Manage > Force extension deactivation, which forces the extension to be uninstalled.
3. Restart your computer.
4. Open the troubleshooting tool again, and now click on Manage > Force extension activation, to install the network extension from scratch again. You may be asked for permissions again, which you need to grant both in the Privacy & Security and on the popup.