Category: 2. Disadvantage

The Google team tries to keep the Angular framework relevant, so it releases new versions two times a year. Unfortunately, the benefit of having up-to-date technology goes hand in hand with the necessity to update Angular-based solutions very often. In most cases, it causes no problem, but sometimes the abundance of Angular versions can become a real pain in the neck for DevOps engineers.

With the advent of newer frameworks like VueJS and ReactJS, Angular has seen a downfall in its popularity. Just a few years ago, developers were mainly debating on whether they should be using Angular or React for their projects. But over the course of the last couple of years, we saw a growth of interest in a third player called VueJS or Vue.js.
 
While the job market in Angular continues to expand, it has been observed that the popularity of the framework has been declining. I believe that too many versions is one of the main issues that the framework needs to address. 

Angular has been evolving. It started out as a JavaScript framework AngularJS and now the current version is Angular 9 with a total of 6 major releases in between. This can cause confusion especially for beginners. 

Many a time, beginners struggle to understand the versioning. I have seen students learning a version of the framework, latest at the time, and by the time they finish their first project, a new major release is out. This causes trust issues. Developers, at times, feel that they must keep working on their apps and resolve version conflicts and compatibility issues. 

Angular is just great for building powerful single-page web applications. However, as with all single-page web applications, there is a disadvantage when it comes to search engine optimization.  
 
Usually single-page applications are rendered on the client side and therefore web crawlers of search engines like Google and Bing are not able to see the complete structure and content of the individual pages of the websites. With this limitation in place,it is not possible to list your website correctly in search engine results.  

However, there are techniques and packages to make this work, but it is an extra effort in terms of development. Angular universal is a way to render the Angular application of the server itself. The technology enables server-side rendering for Angular applications. Angular Universal generates static application pages on the server through a process called server-side rendering. 

While Angular universal takes care of most aspects, it still requires a lot of setup. If you prefer to do it all manually, there are documents available to help you do that but there are gotchas that you need to watch out for. 

While Angular is great, it may not be the case for a complete beginner. Even if you have experience with HTML, CSS and JS, you may feel a little bit uncomfortable with the steep learning curve that it has. It brings its own notions and philosophy to the table that you need to work around.  

Angular is an opinionated framework which means that it has its own rules that developers need to learn and follow. This can be a good and a bad thing, but the learning curve can be uncomfortable for total beginners. I would recommend that you stay patient and start slow. Slow and steady! 

There exists an opinion that Angular is a rather challenging front-end development framework to master. Although many Angular features, such as component-based development, simplify software engineers’ work, boilerplate code and injected dependencies ensure a rather steep learning curve for Angular. In addition, Angular is based on TypeSrcipt instead of JavaScript, which is the most popular language in terms of front-end development. This means that inexperienced developers may need some extra time to understand Angular.

To mitigate this issue, aim to hire experienced Angular developers. Fortunately, the market has a lot to offer in this regard. Besides, community support and additional tools will significantly simplify Angular onboarding for motivated developers.

Angular is known as an excellent solution for building excellent single-page web applications. Such apps are rendered on the client’s side, which prevents web crawlers or search engines, such as Google or Bing, from seeing the full structures and content of relevant web pages. This disrupts the website’s listing in search engine results. As a result, Angular is not a very popular solution among companies that develop websites to promote them with traditional SEO practices.

However, there are certain techniques and packages that allow developers to improve SEO for Angular apps. For example, they can use the Angular universal approach to ensure server-side rendering of Angular applications. This solution eliminates the main factor behind Angular’s SEO limitations.

Some developers consider Angular to be a rather verbose framework. All the components are independent and can be managed separately, but their management is not an easy task. Up to five files may be required for a single component in Angular. A developer should inject dependencies and declare the component lifecycle interfaces. With all these things needed, Angular component code may sometimes be too long and complex.

Fortunately, each new Angular release is aimed at solving this problem. While Angular code is still, usually, far from simple, new releases introduce methods for making it more concise and understandable. In addition, this Angular’s feature may significantly pay off in the long run, as this framework allows you to create a directive that will add behaviors to the component, reducing the amount of work and code maintenance tasks in the future. In addition, Angular CLI provides automation, enabling you to cut down your workload on Angular boilerplate code by 70%.