Update: See the updated post, now that 2.0 is final, here.

Original post continues below.

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This question might seem trivial, but I keep seeing it pop up again and again everywhere in the Angular community. With all respect to the maintainers, they’ve managed to confuse quite a lot of smart people with this.

If you’re new to this world and want to get started with a new project you might have wondered whether you should use 1.x or “jump straight” to Angular 2. On the other hand, if you’ve already got Angular experience you’re probably getting worried about the impending changes and wondered whether you should start adapting to it.

And those are valid questions. After all, what are you supposed to think when every newsletter and forum are filled with articles about Angular 2’s forms, architecture, new router, Typescript, etc.? Why would the community push out so many articles about writing simple apps in Angular 2 if it shouldn’t be used?

The executive summary: There’s no Angular 2 to use, so Angular 1 is still the way to go.

A bit more details

Angular 2 is getting a lot of hype and attention, but the reality is that it is still in alpha and changes quite rapidly. It is not intended at all to be used in production yet. So, really, you can’t and shouldn’t start your company’s next big project using it.

So what’s up with all the articles? It’s a combination of a lot of things.

First, people are excited because Angular 2 brings a lot of nice stuff, and so they start exploring it and writing about the benefits.

Furthermore, it is impossible to be in this community and not hear people mumble about the Angular 2 migration that “will break all our code”. This motivates a lot of people to start learning 2.0 to see what is awaiting us and start understanding what’s going on.

Also, because it’s still heavily under development, writing about its current state and complaining about things actually might change things for the better as opposed to the general useless complaining we’re used to on the internet. It is a rare opportunity to affect technology you might be using for years to come.

All this is just to say that while Angular 2 is getting a lot of hype (and probably will get even more before it’ll be out), it is not production ready. If you have the time or freedom and find it interesting, of course you should give it a try, and even if you don’t have time it’s probably a good idea to keep up with the news and reading material. Eventually, the migration path will start getting clearer and when it does you’ll probably want to know as early as possible what you should be changing.

How will you know when to it’s time to start seriously looking at Angular 2?

If you’re reading this post, I’m assuming you read the news every once in a while. So just make sure to keep doing it. There are plenty of communities and newsletters (cough like the one here on my blog cough) you can trust to update you.

Happy Angularing!