How is Angular Not Dead Yet?

Angular has been completely revamped.

“Welcome to Angular’s renaissance,” said Angular in a post on X. As promised by the developers, the framework has come up with v17 with a lot of new upgrades in its syntax and template features. Angular’s page now includes dark mode, in-depth guides, search-ability, and a lot of tutorials, and most importantly, the Playground, which allows users to write user templates to start with the latest features.

The highlight of the revamp is Angular.dev, which is a new future home for Angular development. This includes new tutorials, updated documentation, and guidance for latest Angular features. And the Playground is where you can explore all these concepts. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge07eJgvtvc

The release blog highlights the company’s dedication towards open source development, and improvement for the future v18 release of Angular, which will focus on stability. Moreover, Emma Twersky, senior developer relations at Angular, highlighted that the company has also reformatted its API and CLI references to look like code in the editor, for easier reference. 

If anything, the updates to the site highlight what Angular framework is now capable of.

https://twitter.com/angular/status/1721588508324679912

Too little too late, every time

While many developers who have been using Angular are extremely excited with the “new feel” of Angular, others are calling it just dead, or merely a revamp. Some even jokingly questioned if it was acquired by Adobe, given the new design of the website and the logo looks very similar to Adobe's. 

Is Angular dead?

Well, not according to its die-hard fans, who are still holding onto the hope that it will make a glorious comeback -- which can still be expected. In the world of web development, where newer, shinier frameworks, such as React, are popping up faster than you can say "Angular", it's easy to wonder if the framework would indeed become a relic of the past.

In 2022, we saw the release of Angular v15, which, according to early reviews, was more refined, stable, supportable, and its last-ditch effort to survive. Sure, it may not have set the internet on fire with excitement, but it's still being used by many.

Angular 15 was dearly loved by a lot of developers. But is that really true?

In May 2023, Angular launched v16 with what it called the “biggest release since the initial rollout of Angular,” but the same could not be said completely about the developer community. 

https://twitter.com/killedbygoogle/status/1721709838126940540

According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2023, Angular has seen better days. It's down to 18.7% usage, a far cry from its glory days of 30.7% in 2021, and 22.9% in 2022. React, Vue, and even jQuery have snatched its crown. Not to mention, Angular's satisfaction rate of 58.6% pales in comparison to React's 74.5% and Vue's 66.9%.

Why the fall from grace? Well, for starters, fresher and lighter frameworks like React and Vue, for instance, have emerged with simpler syntax, faster rendering, better SEO support, and smaller bundle sizes. 

Still afloat

Google has been known for killing a lot of its products. In 2019, it killed AngularJS, but in turn offered its developers Angular, the framework with more than just JavaScript in its focus. 

Regardless, Angular has gone through more versions than any other framework. Though this might seem like a good thing, from AngularJS to v2 to v8, to now v17, with each new version, developers must rewrite or migrate their code, making them feel like they're on a never-ending tech rollercoaster.

And, let's not forget the lack of support and documentation for the older versions, all this while. Though with the beta update, Angular v17 is still garnering love from the developers.

So, Angular may not be your trendiest framework in town, but it's still alive and kicking. Interestingly, Google has also been using React, along with Angular for a lot of its framework. 

But just like with every update and every year, new blogs keep popping up to check if Angular is dead or not. The Angular team knows it, and thus has promised a stable release of v18 soon, as they know that is what the developers have been craving for all this while.