Why Angular Will not Survive 2024
Tags: javascript, angular, node, frontend
Published: 2023-12-27 11:03:38

Angular will surely drift into oblivion before the end of 2024 if all of it isn't already dead. I know some people are going to read the above and be like you don't know what Angular is about. But I'm going to ask you this when was the last time you used Angular for a new project? Except you have sold your soul to Google and decided to stick with Angular then I'm going to say that your answer was "it's been a long time".


The die-hard Angular fans in the room are also going to come back with how Angular is being used across large teams and on some complex applications. But I'm going to tell you that there's nothing that you can do with Angular that you can't achieve with other frameworks with much less effort than in Angular. In today's post, I'm going to go over five solid reasons why I believe Angular will be dead to developers before the end of 2024.

• Typescript Barrier
• Not Beginner friendly
• Bundle Size
• Too much restrictions
• It's just too Overpowered
• Fierce competition

### Typescript Barrier

From the moment Angular adopted a Typescript first approach to building UIs it marked the beginning of the end. As good as this decision may seem it comes with some potential drawbacks. Yes, we get the benefit of type checking in our IDE but the fact that you have to learn Typescript first before you can start using Angular introduces a major barrier to entry for some developers.

Most developers would be okay with just learning and using Javascript and trust me telling them that they have to go learn how to use a superset of a language they barely understand will not yield any positive results. Many developers shy away from angular because of Typescript. It's only the experienced 10X developers who see Typescript and Angular as a win-win. How convenient it would be for newbies if you could use Angular with Javascript then maybe Angular would have been adopted much more than it currently is.

### Angular is not beginner-friendly

Angular do not like beginners and newbies and it doesn't deal any kindly with them. You see Angular was designed to be used on complex web applications and as such it comes fully fledged with everything you need to build and deploy a modern web app. However, all this is not sold to the developer in a way that is simple to digest, and most of the time you need to make use of the features Angular provides when building an app so this demands that you have a strong command over the framework or else you're not going to have a great experience. Angular needs to give more consideration to making Angular more friendly to beginners and that will go a long way in seeing more adoption. 

### Bundle Size

Angular has an unholy bundle size. I believe that it was for this reason that devs came up with solutions like Astro. I once built a very simple app with Angular. It had just two pages. One for showing a search bar where users would search for what they want from GitHub then another page for showing search results. When I was done and tried to deploy to Vercel, oh my God it was so unfortunate because I had issues building and deploying the app because of bundle size exceeded the threshold.

This was so frustrating because I spent at least three days doing that. I had to look for all the things that made the bundle size so large. It was so frustrating I had to deploy with Codesandbox instead. My point here is that when you compare the Bundle Size for Angular to the Bundle Size for other frameworks you'll observe that Angular always has the highest. I'm in support of shipping as much Javascript as possible to the user but Angular is high on something because what the hell is 5MB for bundle size?? 

### Too much restrictions

Angular is opinionated about the way your application should be structured and the patterns you can employ when building your UI, with a heavy emphasis on an Object-oriented approach. Hold on a second but what if I just prefer to work with functions? And Angular is like maybe you can try other frameworks, we don't do that here. Enforcing a particular application structure will make things much more organized and standardized but this is only good if you don't have a good understanding of folder structure and popular development patterns.

The more you realize that there are different ways to structure your project you will not find it amazing to be forced into a particular application structure and you will feel like you're taped to a a chair because there are lots of ways you could express yourself but you're just stuck with one even if it's something you don't like or understand. Most developers would rather not deal with this situation at all so they'd be like I'm on to the other guys.

### It's just too Overpowered

Something about Angular, it's just too much for most jobs around. Most of the time UIs we build tend to be very simple and straight to the point. Very rarely do you see people building something so overly complex. Angular on the other hand is a robust, fully-fledged, and out-of-the-box solution for building UIs. With a full-blown CLI, Built-In router, out-of-the-box state management solution, and Dependency Injection for your services. 

All these are great features that could enable you to build the next big thing in Javascript. But if you just want to build something for your client or customers then 100 percent you'd agree with me your app doesn't need all those features or at least not as complicated as Angular make them. This is what happens when you're overqualified for the Job and nobody wants to hire you because they can't pay you. 

### Fierce competition

The Javascript UI frameworks/library ecosystem is always growing and there's no shortage of options. There are newer frameworks that offer more performance with much less stress and complication.  you can now use Typescript on almost all Javascript UI frameworks so that Typescript advantage is no more. Other frameworks are making it easier than ever to build UI and they are growing at a rate that Angular cannot keep up with.

Signals were recently introduced to Angular but this will do little if anything to slow the decline of Angular.  React, and Vue all have their implementation of Signals so that is just a ploy to make the framework appealing to existing users.


What's your take on the current state of Angular, do you think that Angular will not survive 2024 or do you think Angular is going to make a big comeback? Do you think that other frameworks out there are better than Angular? Or Angular is the undisputed T-Rex in the room? Let me know your thoughts on all of the above and what you think of the article via the comments section. 

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