Angular End of Life - Dates and Lifecycle

"Angular" actually refers to two different frameworks with very different support statuses. AngularJS, the original v1.x framework, is a separate, long-retired project with its own end of life history. Modern Angular (v2 and later) is a complete rewrite in TypeScript and is still actively developed today, with a new major version shipping every six months. Confusing the two is common, and it matters, since AngularJS has been unsupported for years while modern Angular versions cycle through support on a predictable, ongoing schedule.

Angular Lifecycle Explained

Every major version of modern Angular gets 18 months of total support, split into two phases. The first six months are Active Support, during which the version receives new features, bug fixes, and regular updates. The next twelve months are Long Term Support (LTS), during which only critical bugs and confirmed security vulnerabilities get patched, no new features. Unlike some frameworks that only promote alternating versions to LTS, every single Angular major version automatically moves into LTS once its active phase ends, there's no separate LTS-only release track to track.

Google ships a new major version roughly every six months, so at any given time there are typically two or three versions under some form of support, one in active support and one or two in LTS, with everything older already end of life. Once a version's 18-month window closes, Angular stops shipping any further updates for it, security patches included.

Worth noting separately: Protractor, Angular's original end-to-end testing tool, followed its own deprecation path independent of the framework's version lifecycle. The Angular team announced its retirement in August 2022, and Protractor reached its own end of life on August 31, 2023. Projects still relying on it for testing should treat it the same as any other end of life dependency, since it no longer receives updates regardless of which Angular version the application itself is running.