AngularJS will have one more major release then it will enter a three-years period of Long Term Support (LTS), while Angular continues the cycle of a major release every six months.
Since the release of Angular 2.x, later called simply Angular, AngularJS has seen a small decrease in usage according to the NPM registry, which shows that most projects that had used it have continued to do so. Because NPM reports almost double popularity of Angular compared to AngularJS, it results that most developers have chosen to use Angular for new projects. For those with investments in AngularJS, Peter Bacon Darwin, an Angular core team member, has published a roadmap outlining the development plans for the framework.
AngularJS 1.6 was released in December 2016, followed by nine patch releases that brought fixes and small improvements. The plan is to release this spring one more significant version, then AngularJS 1.7 will enter a period of three years of LTS on July 1, 2018. The team wants to continue adding patch releases until June 30, 2018, but nothing that "requires even a minor breaking change."
During 1.7 LTS, plans are to fix security issues and restore the framework to work again if any of the major vendors introduces an incompatible change in their browser or there is a similar issue with jQuery. The roadmap ends with an invitation to the Angular platform, so we can interpret that AngularJS hits the end of the road when LTS ends.
Angular is keeping up with the schedule of having a major release each six months, the following one (6.0) being planned for March, with 7.0 for September and 8.0 for the spring of the following year. LTS will be provided for one year for Angular 4.0 and 6.0, providing only security and critical fixes. To benefit from new features and improvements of old ones, developers will have to use the latest version. While the Angular team promises compatibility between consecutive major versions, developers are advised to keep an eye on deprecated APIs which might be removed two versions later after being deprecated.
