> I get why companies are doing this, they want easier cross platform, easier deployability of updates, easier to find devs who know the toolchain, easier to make it work on mobile.

You forgot it justifies having a recurring revenue model, which I'd guess is the main reason :D.

I’m intrigued by “home where we don’t have Internet” — is that a deliberate choice, a side effect of other choices, a happenstance?

It was a choice. I was tired of my family being disconnected from one another, getting nothing done, and being always connected to some electronic consumption device.

We got more done in the past 6 months with no TV, internet, or data plan, than in the past 6 years.

Also, social media usually tends to dull a person's enjoyment of life, turn them pessimistic and depressed, make them lazy and prefer endless consumption to hard work, and make them feel resentful of the people in their life. Even "harmless" time killer websites do this like reddit and imgur, and even HN.

I've seen all these affects and more for years on our family and many other families we know, and after getting rid of internet, TV and data plan, our life has turned around substantially.

The internet is a great resource and I use it when I need it, by going to the library and using their wifi. But when I don't need it, it just becomes a burden and a crutch if I have it with me at all times.

Good to hear it works for you. I'm honestly surprised, though. I tried something like this on myself 10 years ago, during my university years - but I quickly discovered that not having Internet at home makes it hard to to get anything done (computer science studies, though) and keep up-to-date with university matters. It also disconnected me socially from other students. I abandoned this after ~a year, because the only thing it did was a) making me almost live on the campus by necessity, b) making life slightly more annoying for other people in the house.

That was 10 years ago. I suppose today the social disconnection would be even more pronounced. So I have to ask: do you live in a small town or a large one? Are your kids pre-school/primary school aged? Are your and your spouse's professions outside of the technical or Internet-requiring fields?

When I split my time so that 9-5pm is work hours and outside that time is family time, whether doing chores, fixing up the house, running errands, or relaxing with the wife and kids, none of these seem to need the internet. But it sounds like that's not the situation you were in 10 years ago.

We live in a large suburb, and because of lack of constant electronic distractions, we're meeting our neighbors for the first time (albeit slowly, since nobody around here ever steps outside).

The kids have a great time at school, but they keep observing that all the other kids are surprisingly behind at pretty much every skill, and express surprise that they enjoy phone games where all you do is tap the screen to make a number go higher.

My wife stays at home raising our young children, and only really uses internet to communicate with the older kids' schools, which she can do with her iPhone anywhere that has wifi, including Walmart.

I'm the breadwinner of our family, doing software consulting work that often needs internet but often can be done offline. As long as I use the library's wifi for that aspect, I'm able to do my job just fine.

Honestly, if software wasn't my skill, I would be using the internet a lot less often, probably as much as I would check out a library book, and for the same reasons too. But software is what God made me good at, so it's how I need to support my family.

That said, I've installed a ton of things on our offline home computer that my kids find useful, such as PICO-8 and IntelliJ IDEA Community (so we can learn Java).

Thanks a lot for clarifying. What you've described is exactly a situation I thought going off-line wouldn't work in, so it's pretty educational for me that it works well for you.