After a grace period induced by the current global pandemic, long-term support for AngularJS has been discontinued. While AngularJS will still remain available, its repo will be archived and will receive no more additional updates, including security patches.
Although Google announced AngularJS was entering a long-term period support over three years ago, AngularJS is still in wide use today. This can be explained with the fact that upgrading from AngularJS to its successor, Angular, is no easy task, since Google re-engineered it completely going from version 1 to version 2. Differences between the two frameworks are not minor, starting with the language they require to adopt —JavaScript for AngularJS, TypeScript for Angular— up to the overall architecture, with AngularJS following the MVC paradigm, mobile support, and so on.
With the end of LTS for AngularJS, though, the time has come to start planning how to move away from it. At any moment a new vulnerability could be discovered that requires prompt patching. Likewise, updates to AngularJS could be required to fix incompatibilities with new browser versions or with other frameworks. There are a number of alternatives developers can take into consideration, including AngularJS successor Angular, Vue.js, and React, all options that remain valid today. Of course, being AngularJS MIT-licensed, nothing rules out the possibility the community will fork the repo and keep evolving it.
In fact, such a fork already exists, maintained by the team at XLTS.dev, aiming to provide extended long-term support to any organizations not ready yet to migrate away from AngularJS. The XLTS team announced they are planning to support it until the end of 2026 at least. XLTS provides support contracts aiming to ensure AngularJS remains up-to-date with security patches, breaking changes brought by new browser versions, and jQuery patches. Interestingly, the team at XLTS is made up of previous and current contributors to the Angular project.
Existing projects that use AngularJS will still have access to CDN URLs, npm and bower packages. Likewise, the GitHub repo will provide read-only access to the code, issue, and pull request history.
