Greek philosopher Heraclitus’ famous quote ‘Change is the only constant’, applies befittingly in the world of programming, where a new technology is being unveiled almost every other day. When AngularJS entered such a dynamic world in the year 2010, many speculations were made about its future. Since then a lot has been said and done about it, but the technology never lost its grip on the ever changing industry, and is still one of the most used front-end development frameworks around.

Lately, however, with the emergence of specialised libraries and frameworks like AppRun, Vue, and Elm, the future of AngularJS is again being put to question. Even though the framework came out neat and triumphant from similar situations that arose with the emergence of backbone.js and ember.js, this time, unfortunately, the case is graver.

The foremost reason for AngularJS investors to worry about the frameworks’ future is the growing popularity of React. Not only is react a bit more efficient than AngularJS, it’s also supported by huge names in the industry like Facebook, one of the winning factors that until now has kept Angular ahead of its comparatively small rivals. However, all is not lost yet. There are multiple benefits of AngularJS that promises an optimistic future being itself supported by Tech Titan Google. Read our post to know ten reasons why AngularJS is still ideal for investment for future web applications.

However, to accurately point out the future of the framework, or any technology for that matter, it is important to draw a comprehensive analysis of competing technologies as well.

The chart above was shared by FreeCodeCamp which conducted a Lighthouse audit on the prominent front-end libraries and frameworks. It is a performance chart that highlights the time it took for each of these technologies to show the content to the client. This means technologies with lower bars performed the best. It is, therefore, worrisome that AngularJS is among the slowest of all these technologies.

However, there is a catch here. The program used to test all these technologies was extremely basic. Many of these technologies aren’t versatile or robust enough to support more complex or bigger applications, and this in turn also explains why AngularJS took more time. It has to import a huge library that while making it resourceful also makes it a bit bulky in comparison. This also explains why AngularJS performed poorly on another test- the size of the application file.

So, now we can tell that as far as versatility or comprehensive view of the application is considered, AngularJS is still winning the race.

Popularity

Another concern that is keeping investors on the edges of their seats is the growing prominence of React among people. Until last year, both the technologies were leading the market with an almost negligible difference between them. Here’s a Google Trends chart that is showing a gradual increase in the popularity of React among the Google search engine users. It also shows how React is increasingly getting ahead of AngularJS, which unfortunately is declining.

On a closer analysis between the exact rivals, however, the difference is far less noticeable. Here is a line chart showing the comparison of the prominence of the search terms ReactJS and AngularJS. Though we can see the same pattern repeating, the gradual increase for ReactJS and gradual decline for AngularJS, it is apparent that even if the same progress is continued for the coming years, AngularJS will stay more popular than ReactJS, in the near future at least.

So undoubtedly, there are enough reasons to worry about the future of the technology, but we have seen that many of them are rather too overestimated. Now let’s consider the brighter side of the AngularJS future too.

AngularJS is still backed by industry leaders like Google and Microsoft. In fact, Google has recently also launched the latest version of the technology- AngularJS 1.7.2, clearly stating that the company has no plans of pulling away their support anytime soon. Other than that, the huge community of AngularJS supporters is still growing. To date, the biggest community of Front-end frameworks on StackOverflow is that of Angular. The platform has also noted Node.js and AngularJS continue to be the most commonly used technologies in this [Frameworks, Libraries, and Tools] category, with React and .Net Core also important to many developers.

If all this doesn’t promote a prosperous future for AngularJS, go ahead and review why the technology has initially got so much support by revising its key features. If that doesn’t do the job, connect with our AngularJS developers and discuss your idea of web application with them. They will tell you why the technology is great for your next project. We are a dedicated AngularJS development agency, and with our research on the AngularJS market, we too can vouch for the tech’s favourable future.