Environment variables are frequently used to configure device-specific identifiers or hardware settings.
For example, a robot running Balena might use environment variables to configure the port name of a camera it is connected to.
Currently, when you put a hardware device in Local Mode via BalenaCloud, this removes access to all the variables which are normally injected into containers.
This is inconvenient because it requires a user to copy any Device Variables from the cloud into a local .env file before starting a balena local deploy in order to retain the config that the device had outside of local mode.
It would be very useful if cloud environment variables continued to persist in local mode. Developers could still use a .env file to override specific variables, but this would greatly improve the utility of local mode on hardware.