angularjs 1.x support lifecycle

Question

I am currently managing an AngularJS development project. There is talk that we need to move to at least AngularJS 1.5 from our current 1.2. One of my requirements to move is that I have to provide evidence of the end of support for 1.5 but cannot find any end of support information after many hours on the angular site and multiple google searches.

Has there been an official comment on when security patches and bug fixes will no longer be developed for Angular v1.x?

Answer 1

According to the Angular dev team, end of life for Angular 1.x will occur when more than 50% of traffic to Angular's website goes to the Angular 2.0 site.

Direct quote:

One of the biggest worries was about how long Google was going to support version 1.X. To allay these fears, Google has taken a new approach to determining where the community is at and what they want. The Angular 1.X project will continue to be hosted at angularjs.org. Angular 2.0, now in Alpha, will be hosted at angular.io.

The team will look at the traffic to both sites, along with GitHub, in order to determine where the community is still invested. This means that if a majority of traffic is still at angularjs.org, the team will continue to focus resources on 1.X. Angular 1.X will not end life until the majority of traffic has moved to 2.0. "We'll continue releasing Angular 1 releases until the vast majority of you migrate to Angular 2," said Minar.

The above quote was from March 2015. A more recent quote from October 2015 says this:

We at Google are actually going to be on Angular 1 for some time, even though we’ve started to adopt Angular 2 internally,” Green said, speaking about Google’s own Angular-based projects.

PS: For those of us still using AngularJS 1.x, here's a link so you can can add your vote for Angular 1 simply by clicking over to the website: https://www.angularjs.org

I couldn't find an official announcement for when security patches and bug fixes will no longer be developed. The closest I found was from October 2014 which may not be relevant anymore:

Quote:

According to Brad Green of Angular, Angular 1.3 will continue to receive bugfix and security patch support for 18-24 months after the release of version 2.0.

Although my opinion isn't official, I would expect that the community of developers will fork Angular 1.x and continue to maintain it for many years. There are far too many large applications written on top of Angular 1.x to just drop everything and dash off to Angular2.

Answer 2

The AngularJS team announced the end of official support by July 2021. They will release one more version (v1.7) and in July 2018, they will enter a Long Term Support period of 3 years.

During this LTS period they will only apply fixes to v1.7 that are essential for security or browser compatibility, or jQuery changes that would cause production applications to stop working.

After the LTS period, no changes will be made anymore (by Google).

The official announcement can be found in the Angular Blog: Stable AngularJS and Long Term Support.

Answer 3

Has there been an official comment on when security patches and bug fixes will no longer be developed for Angular v1.x?

Not until last contributor goes away! Foremost AngularJS is licensed under liberal MIT License and everybody can fork it and modify it endlessly.

For those worrying about "official Google support" - well, between March 2016 and March 2017 there were 20 releases of AngularJS 1.x - the latest is 1.6.3 - doesn't look like abandoned project any time soon. It differs so much from Angular v2 and v4 (to be released this month) that it will have it's own life even after Google decides move away. Either they transfer the github project to community maintainers or community fork will take over.

There are lots of spectacular examples of communities taking over projects for various reasons. A notable example is io.js - large group of contributors decided to fork Node.js when Joyent, the creator company, was not releasing updates often enough to satisfy the community.

This is the beauty of open source software.

Answer 4

In addition to the post to the Angular blog on 2018-01-26: Stable AngularJS and Long Term Support

The following announcement has been added to the AngularJS Docs:

After July 1st 2018

Any version branch not shown in the following table (e.g. 1.6.x) is no longer being developed.

Version   Status  Comments
1.2.x   Long Term Support   Last version to provide IE 8 support
1.7.x   Long Term Support   See Long Term Support section below.

Long Term Support

On July 1st 2018, we will enter a Long Term Support period for AngularJS.

At this time we will focus exclusively on providing fixes to bugs that satisfy at least one of the following criteria:

• A security flaw is detected in the 1.7.x branch of the framework
• One of the major browsers releases a version that will cause current production applications using AngularJS 1.7.x to stop working
• The jQuery library releases a version that will cause current production applications using AngularJS 1.7.x to stop working.

— AnuglarJS MISC - Long Term Support

Answer 5

An update has been posted to the Angular blog on 2018-01-26: Stable AngularJS and Long Term Support

The team is currently working towards a release of AngularJS 1.7.0 and we will continue development of 1.7 through June 30, 2018. On July 1, we will enter a 3 year period of Long Term Support (LTS).

• January 1 — June 30, 2018 AngularJS 1.7 Active Development
• July 1, 2018 — June 30, 2021 AngularJS 1.7 LTS Period