Angular 5.0.0

I use angular 4.x for two and a half reasons in a small shop (e.g., just me, making internal web apps for my org)

(1) Ionic makes it relatively easy to bundle angular apps into hybrid-native packaging. I personally know it's not much different from users pinning an app to a start screen (other than the offline functionality you get in iOS, since iOS doesn't support service workers yet), but my users like apps for whatever reason. Of course, Ionic is moving away from angular-only, so this won't be a constraint in the future.

(1a) I have worked with react-native and nativescript as well, and can say that it's way easier to build cross-platform stuff with Ionic. If you're building bog-standard businessish CRUD apps, Ionic is super-straightforward. If you're doing cutting edge interfaces and games, well, that's not what this is for.

(2) I honestly prefer Ionic's parameter-binding syntax to mixed JSX syntax. I've written enough JSP, PHP, handlebars and other mixed-template languages, tyvm. I like having a template with data-bound properties and a controller in its own file.

(2.5) Another preference: while I like unidirectional data flow and have written my own rxjs-based middleware for fetching data out of a local cache and from and API (and sending data back), I'm not a fan of how redux and redux-like architectures work. Giant switch blocks feel like they're just re-inventing object method dispatch from another angle.

At the end of the day, the performance differential is negligible (I probably write faster code in angular, because I'm more conversant with it). I get more frustrated with Ionic than Angular most days (I am also looking forward to a future version where using Ionic doesn't tie you into a specific locked version of angular, typescript, and build tooling that's hard to modify).

Sure, there's weaknesses, but from my perspective, people like to yell about angular because they made so many breaking changes with the v2 transition - it's basically just a different framework from the same people now. But the latest stuff is fast and has great AOT package size reduction. If you just come to it as a "well, maybe I'll use angular for this new project" perspective instead of "dang, I don't want to port my 1.x stuff over", you're fine.

I somehow do not get all that bashing. Angular did extremely great things with Angular 1 (back then). As time passed, the community learned that there are better/other concepts. React came out - nice. NG2/4 therefore had to include major changes to pave the way for the future and more modern concepts. And it is important that they do that because some people have built huge teams and applications based on Angular. So, thanks!

From ng1 perspective, the migration path to ng2/4 is more economic than a Vue or React rewrite. We examined that in depth. This is why we upgraded to ng2 instead of rewriting the application in Vue or React. And as i can see it, ng5 fixes major issues from ng2 and we're happy that the Angular team keeps on pushing here.

There are plenty of teams inside of Google stuck on Angular 1.x

All that said, I was working on 1.x code for quite some time, and only started playing with angular 2+ after 4.0.0 had been released. If I had started a new project during the transition, I probably would have ended up using react. Mostly timing is all.

I've just (as in, 5 minutes ago) deployed an application that we upgraded from angular 1.x (originally 1.2, up through 1.5) to angular 4 using ng-upgrade. I've also got another application that I've migrated over to react from angular 1.3.

I'm a fan of react. I appreciate the component-based approach, and it really addresses a lot of my complaints about angular.js. If I was starting an application from scratch, I'm almost certainly going to use react or maybe preact for it.

However, having been through this process, if angular had been as far along as it is now when I began the migration process on app 2 (angular.js -> react) I would have almost certainly opted to go with angular instead. Its not perfect, I still have my complaints with it (promises? observables? make up your effing mind already gang) but the migration path wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. NgUpgrade is pretty good and gives you a path forward, and I think you'll find once you're in it that mostly, your angular 1.x stuff will be a fairly straightforward migration to angular whereas you're going to be doing more of a rewrite with react. I've arguably lost a year of time where I wasn't able to deploy significant new features while I got the full UI ported to react to make a clean release. That's valuable time I wish I could get back. (Its more complicated than that, but things usually are…)

TL;DR—Upgrade to Angular, its good enough that you get 80% of the improvements you'd feel moving to react or something else and you can preserve momentum.