The Angular 2 framework now supports semantic versioning, and it was announced that major upgrades (with breaking changes) will be released twice a year. In particular, in March of 2017 the version 4.0.0 will be released, in September – 5.0.0 and so on.

This is all good but the problem is that not only the versioning will be different, but Angular team is considering changing the name from Angular 2 to Angular. This will create lots of confusion in the Angular community.

First, a bit of history. The older version of this super popular Web framework is called AngularJS (currently at 1.6.0). Two years ago a complete redesign of this framework was announced, and the new framework got the name Angular 2. I guess, someone at Google suggested to keep the word Angular in the name to leverage the fact that more than 1.3 million of software developers were already using AngularJS, and most of these people would want to upgrade to the newer version of the same framework.

The problem is that Angular 2 is completely different framework, and suggesting the roadmap for upgrading existing AngularJS apps to Angular 2 is no different than suggesting a roadmap for upgrading an app from Ember or React to Angular 2. But the marketing plan worked out nicely, and more than 700K developers are using Angular 2 by now. No wonder – Angular 2 is a great framework.

People started creating Angular 2 communities to post articles, and ask for help. For example, the Reddit’s Angular 2 community is pretty active and has 6800 members: https://www.reddit.com/r/Angular2/. Questions and answers on StackOverflow are marked with the tag #angular2: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/angular2. LinkedIn has a group of 7900 Angular 2 developers: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8434339.

Bloggers (myself included) are posting articles and tutorials that have Angular 2 in their names. PluralSight, Lynda.com, egghead.io and many independent developers produce video contend with Angular 2 in their titles.

Book authors (myself included) wrote about a dozen books with Angular 2 in their titles, and these books will remain relevant and useful for several years, unless Google will decide to completely re-write this framework again.

If the framework will be renamed to Angular, anyone searching for Angular 2 content will be inevitable getting materials for both AngularJS and Angular 2. Just try finding posts on StackOverflow tagged as Angular: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/angular. The “angular” in the URL will be automatically converted to “angularjs” and you’ll be seeing 200K+ irrelevant posts about AngularJS. IMO, it’s a disservice to the community. BTW, there is Angular Reddit group as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/angular, and these developers may want to keep their forum clean from Angular 2 posts.

I suggest to keep Angular 2 as the name of the framework. The digit 2 here won’t represent the version, but rather the next generation of this framework. So in March we’ll get Angular 2 v. 4.0.0, in September – Angular 2 v.5.0.0 and so on. Content producers can still include “Angular 2” in the titles and use the tag #angular2 in social networks.

What do you think?

P.S. The community may decide to keep using the tag #angular2 regardless of the official name of this framework.