AngularDart Roadmap Update

Today, we’re announcing a major update to the AngularDart packages. This release represents many engineer-years of effort and will bring a number of enhancements to current users, including improved performance for our largest apps, simplified the most common use cases, and removing rough edges. If you're already using AngularDart, we encourage you to upgrade.

With this release, we also want to take this opportunity to call out a gradual shift of priorities for the project. This should not come as news to those who have been watching, as we’ve talked about this over the last few months on the GitHub repo.

While adoption of AngularDart has continued to grow rapidly within Google, the external web framework space is highly competitive, and we've only seen modest adoption of the framework by non-Google teams. As such, we’ve shifted our engineering focus towards Google projects such as the new Google Play Console and Google Ads. We want to state this explicitly because we think it’s important to be transparent about our investment priorities for ongoing development over the coming years.

One major factor in our decision to focus AngularDart on Google apps is that Flutter has grown at a meteoric rate, with over two million developers relying on it to build beautiful, fast, native experiences across mobile, desktop and now web. We have developers asking for even more here, and we intend to provide it.

To be clear, we are continuing to develop AngularDart. But turning a successful internal project into a successful external project is not an incremental task. Open sourcing a product involves more than simply pushing source code to a GitHub repository and publishing packages. For users to be successful, they need documentation and examples. They expect questions to be answered, bugs to be fixed, and features to evolve. As such, we hope to see a growth in community ownership over these areas. 

This release introduces new infrastructure tooling, with which we hope to be able to update the source repositories and publish the packages more frequently. At the same time, we have finite resources to support big, open source projects, and we'd like to focus these resources on growing and maturing the Flutter ecosystem.

Our twelve-month roadmap, therefore, is to:

1. Publish a long-term stable release of the core AngularDart packages to pub.dev as soon as possible. These will support the latest stable Dart SDK and have updated dependencies.

2. Continue to update the source repository with the latest internal changes. At the moment, these are mostly focused on enabling null safety in the code base.

3. Focus on updating the packages to Dart's new null-safety feature.

If you’re already developing with AngularDart, we want you to know that we will continue to support you with updates. But if you’re starting a new web-based project with Dart, we would like to strongly encourage you to consider Flutter, which is our long-term offering for cross-platform development.

For more information on our progress towards our roadmap above, watch the source repository and the package page.

Note: this announcement addresses only the AngularDart effort. The Angular Javascript Framework is a completely separate endeavor.