Sunsetting a Framework: Lessons from AngularJS

Imagine showing up to work one day and finding your entire tech stack engraved on a tombstone.

That’s exactly what happened at ngEurope in 2014. The Angular team stood on stage and declared AngularJS “dead.” The catch? Its replacement, Angular, was still two years away.

Developers didn’t get a bridge. They got a chasm.

And over two million engineers were left staring into it.

AngularJS began as a side project—a thoughtful attempt to simplify web development. It solved the headaches of data binding, view updates, and boilerplate glue code.

But it also shipped with architectural baggage:

• A digest loop that could create infinite performance traps
• A structure too porous to prevent devs from shooting themselves in the foot
• Debugging nightmares in production-scale apps

So Google decided to throw it all out and start fresh.

No incremental path. No backward compatibility. A total rewrite: Angular.

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The Two-Year Gap That Gave React Its Moment

Developers were stuck in limbo between 2014’s death sentence and Angular’s 2016 release. AngularJS was deprecated. Angular wasn’t production-ready. Meanwhile, React came on the scene and offered a modern, component-based model, without the baggage or the wait.

Stephen Fluin, who joined Google six months before Angular launched, recalls it clearly.

“You couldn’t choose AngularJS because it was deprecated," Fluin said. "You couldn’t choose Angular because it wasn’t stable. So people chose React.”

The fallout? A mass framework exodus and one of the most significant shifts in frontend history.

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Lessons in Breaking Change: What Not to Do

Let’s be clear: The Angular team cared. Deeply.

They wanted to build a better tool. They partnered with Microsoft to adopt TypeScript (then obscure, now ubiquitous). They worked nights, weekends, built migration tools like ngUpgrade. But the damage was done.

“If I were in charge, I would’ve found an incremental path. Not because rewrites are wrong—but because abandonment has a cost,” Fluin admits.

There’s a name for what AngularJS users experienced. Framework abandonment syndrome.

One day, your framework is alive and patched. The next, it's a ghost—technically “supported,” but practically unusable.

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What Supporting the Left-Behind Actually Looks Like

Supporting legacy users isn't just about fixing CVEs. It’s about building an ecosystem of answers:

• How do you respond to security bugs in a framework you no longer update?
  
  
• Who helps devs maintain compliance?
  
  
• What happens when a browser update breaks your app?
  
  

The truth is, most software in the world is “dead”—unmaintained, untested, and untouched for years. But businesses still run on it—hospitals, banks, government agencies. Sunsetting responsibly means leaving a trail of tools, documents, and support behind.

“Even if it’s not Google doing it,” Fluin said, “having an option solves a problem for everybody.”

Enter HeroDevs: A Living Will for Dying Frameworks

That’s where HeroDevs stepped in—partnering with Google through XLTS (now part of HeroDevs) to provide Never-Ending Support (NES) for AngularJS.

It wasn’t just a business move.
It was a continuity plan.

• CVE-level security patching
  
  
• Compatibility with evolving browser APIs
  
  
• SLA-backed compliance coverage
  
  
• A dedicated team maintaining the code developers were still running
  
  

HeroDevs didn’t just keep AngularJS breathing—they gave it a caretaker. And they’ve since done the same for Spring 4, Express 3, Node 16, and Drupal 7.

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What Future-Proofing Should Look Like

The Angular team learned. Today, they ship majors every six months. They built ngUpdate to codify migration paths. They think in terms of “breaking budgets”— the amount of change devs can absorb at once.

And most importantly, they learned that when you can’t prevent the pain, you should at least pair it with value.

Frameworks aren’t just code—they’re communities, workflows, investments. And when one dies, what you leave behind matters just as much as what you build next.

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