The myth Angular is in decline

Last year the COO of the NodeJS Foundation Laurie Voss got on stage at JSConf and proclaimed npm downloads of Angular had peaked and were in decline, backed up by data in this blog post. The NodeJS Foundation had conducted a survey of 10 million users and combined that data with metrics they collected from downloads of popular frameworks.

I thought it was a bunch of hogwash then and still do now. This is why. Downloads of @angular/core and @angular/cli, the two most essential packages for Angular development are increasing over time!

The package Angular engineers rely on for development (@angular/core) has over 2.2 million weekly downloads and growing.

The @angular/cli package sees ~220,000 less downloads a week but the weekly downloads are also increasing. This is an impressive adoption rate for a tool a large majority of Angular developers rely on to build Angular.

Since April 2018 weekly downloads of the @angular/core package have increased by ~1.5 million, roughly a 360% jump in one year.

It is worth noting the weekly downloads of React, Angular, and Vue are all seeing a healthy bump over the past year.

React is the most popular JavaScript library with over 6 million weekly downloads. React has roughly a 260% increase in weekly downloads since April 2018.

Vue has climbed in popularity to over 1 million weekly downloads in March 2019, enjoying a ~320% increase in weekly downloads since April 2018.

If there is any trend regarding front end frameworks it is the JavaScript community is consolidating around the 3 major frameworks.

It seems the NodeJS Foundation weighted the downloads against the legacy AngularJS project This could lead to a problematic picture of Angular adoption.

It is important for organizations with so much influence in the development community to get the numbers right!

I find it quite ironic the @angular/core package has seen more growth in weekly npm downloads than React or Vue over the past year, considering a major player in the JavaScript community is getting on stage saying Angular is in decline. React is indeed the most popular library out there for web development and should be celebrated for its modular design, but don't count Angular out just yet! Angular is still an incredibly popular solution for front end web development and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future.

P.S. Congrats to Vue for reaching over 1 million downloads on npm in March!