Angular team unveils strategy for 2025

The 2025 strategy document for Google’s Angular web development framework calls for enhancing the developer experience with capabilities such as zoneless change detection and signal-based forms, and making developer adoption of new features easier with schematics.

A blog post on the Angular 2025 strategy was published January 13 by Minko Gechev, product and developer relations lead for Angular at Google. To enhance the developer experience, Gechev called out projects for 2025 such as promoting zoneless to developer preview and prototyping signal-based forms. Zoneless will enable Angular to have more efficient change detection, improved interoperability in spaces such as micro front ends, and improved initial load performance. Signal-based forms aim to address shortcomings in forms such as missing features, scalability, type safety, and unification. Template-driven and reactive forms also will benefit from integration with signals. “We’ll continue supporting the existing forms module, making it interoperate with signal forms, while gradually recommending signal forms as the best practice,” Gechev said.

Sectorless components also are seen as a way to enhance developer experience. Simplifying dependency management in components is a goal, with the community included in the process. Sectorless will resolve the “double imports” problem and improve the developer experience when creating components. An RFC (request for comments) for sectorless components is planned for 2025, along with prototyping a solution. Another goal for enhancing the developer experience is replacement of the deprecated Karma test runner for executing JavaScript code in multiple browsers.

To make it easier for Angular developers to adopt new features, plans call for evolving Angular documentation to reflect the latest best practices along with increasing the visibility of features that help web developers meet their goals, and making it easy to adopt Angular in an existing stack. Adoption of new features would be made easier with schematics and increasing the visibility of features within and beyond the Angular community, Gechev said.

The latest releases of Angular have prompted growing excitement about new features, Gechev said. But Angular has had some rough times. “We acknowledge that Angular had a few tough years followed by what now people call the ‘Angular Renaissance,’“ Gechev said. The most recent release was Angular 19, which arrived in November with previews of incremental hydration and a route-level render mode.

Gechev also shared results from Angular’s developer survey for 2024, which drew close to 10,000 responses. The survey found that 79% of Angular developers are using the latest two major versions of Angular, 90% are using standalone components, directives, and pipes, and more than 80% are using built-in control flow. Close to 90% of the respondents reported being satisfied with the framework.