Unglamorous end of AngularJs development

A bit of whining for history’s sake.

Here is the post on 1.6.0 AngularJs release version from the official blog post dated December 2016:

Angular 1.6 will get regular non-breaking change releases over the next six months, and we will be aiming for the release of Angular 1.7 containing any necessary breaking changes by Summer 2017.

Ultimately version 1.7.0  was released in May 2018 with the following note:

1.7.0 is the last scheduled release of AngularJS that includes breaking changes. 1.7.x patch releases will continue to receive bug fixes and non-breaking features until AngularJS enters Long Term Support mode (LTS) on July 1st 2018.

Here is the related blog post by the Angular team.

As far as I know there were no official communications regarding destiny of AngularJs between December 2016 and January 2018.

Let me just say it didn’t feel great — we (AngularJs  developers) were waiting for new features planned for 1.7  supposedly coming in six months (sorry, can’t find the document with the list of features right now) but instead there was deafening silence for over a year and then the death sentence came.

On the other hand we all knew that Angular 2.0 was in development, and it was being built from scratch with very little regard to backward compatibly (admittedly this got much better down the road).

It doesn’t come as a surprise that dev community nowadays is a bit sceptical about long-term Google OpenSource commitments.