angularjs 1.x support lifecycle and end-of-life

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?

Solution 1:

End Of Life for AngularJS is December 31st, 2021. You can read more about it HERE on the AngularJS docs page.

Previously the EOL was scheduled for June 30, 2021. However, the Angular team released a blog post stating that they moved that deadline back to the end of December 2021 due to COVID-19.

On July 1st 2018, we entered a Long Term Support (LTS) period for AngularJS 1.8. We originally announced that we would discontinue the support on the 31st of July 2021.

Over the past few months we heard that many companies are hurt by the unprecedented times caused by the global pandemic of COVID-19. In response, we are extending the AngularJS LTS with another 6 months, until the 31st of December 2021.

A lot of companies have yet to begin/finish their migrations away from AngularJS 1.x. On the AngularJS docs there is a project referenced called XLTS.dev that will be providing an extended support for AngularJS projects. That team is made up of some of the core AngularJS team members, AngularJS Material team members, inventors of Angular Universal, former Angular team members, the Scully team members, and ng-conf team members. Sounds like you can go there to continue getting:

• Security Patches
• Browser Breakage Patches
• jQuery Breakage Patches

This is great news for anyone still on an AngularJS project that needs support.

Solution 2:

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.

Solution 3:

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.