8 Key Benefits of Using Angular for Development
Angular, the front-end framework with superpowers, is here to unlock a world of dynamic, user-friendly web and mobile app experiences. Find out how Angular can empower your project!
Content Map
More chaptersFront-end technology has been evolving in leaps and bounds, leading to the question of whether “older” technologies, like Angular, still hold their grounds. Even then, Angular has consistently remained a top contender in the world of front-end development frameworks.
In today’s article, we’ll discuss the attractive benefits Angular offers, why teams should consider this platform, and if there are any limits of the technology that one should be aware of.
Key Takeaways:
- Angular is a powerful front-end framework widely used to build high-performing, successful applications.
- Angular is most commonly used to build single-page applications, enterprise web apps, mobile apps, and progressive apps.
- Angular boasts major advantages in front-end development:
- A modular structure to better organize, control, and maintain the codebase.
- Two-way data binding in Angular MVVM ensures automatic synchronization between the UI and model.
- TypeScript support and built-in tools make debugging and testing easier.
- Angular’s tools and libraries RxJS, Angular Material and Angular Universal boost the overall development process to create robust and dynamic apps on all devices.
What Is Angular?
Definition
Angular is an open-source, TypeScript-based framework developed and maintained by Google for the purpose of developing dynamic web applications. This framework provides:
- A structured approach to front-end development with a component-based architecture,
- Built-in libraries for features like routing and forms,
- A suite of developer tools for building, testing, and maintaining scalable applications.
Angular enables developers to create interactive, high-performance user interfaces that can scale from small projects to enterprise-level solutions.
Simple Angular Code Examples
At its core, Angular is building complex apps by combining multiple components, which are reusable building blocks of the UI. Each component entails:
- HTML Template – Defines the UI structure
- TypeScript Class – Contains the logic and data
- CSS Styles – Adds styling to the component
To better understand this concept, an Angular component that displays a greeting message would be as follows.
1. Creating a Component (TypeScript + HTML)
// app.component.ts
import { Component } from '@angular/core';
@Component({
selector: 'app-root', // This is the tag used in HTML to insert this component
template: `<h1></h1>`, // HTML template (UI)
styleUrls: ['./app.component.css'] // Optional CSS styles
})
export class AppComponent {
message: string = 'Hello, Angular!'; // Data that appears in the template
}2. Using the Component in HTML
<!-- index.html -->
<body>
<app-root></app-root> <!-- This is where our Angular component will be displayed -->
</body>Examples of Successful Apps Built with Angular
Despite many doubts about the relevance of Angular in 2025, its presence is still robust. Thanks to its rich features, Angular is widely used across numerous industries, including e-commerce, email services, finance, and so on. The list of successful apps built with Angular is long, but we have chosen the three most notable cases.
- Google: A giant in the tech industry, Google provides a variety of tech services, including search engines, email services, and mobile apps. Angular is supported by Google, so it only makes sense that this organization uses the framework to build its digital products like Google Play Store and Google Voice.
- Forbes: One of the most well-known American business magazines uses AngularJS to increase the loading page speed for a better user experience. This is all thanks to the web interface’s real-time rendering.
- Microsoft Office: Microsoft developed TypeScript, the programming language used in Angular. Microsoft Office Online, which includes web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, is built using Angular as its front-end framework, allowing a dynamic, interactive, and scalable user experience across its apps.
A Brief History of Angular
Angular was first introduced as AngularJS in 2010 by Google engineers Misko Hevery and Adam Abrons. Initially, the framework aimed to make web application development easier for internal projects. Google later renamed the project AngularJS and began developing the entire framework.
As time went on and applications grew, AngularJS struggled with performance and maintainability. To address these issues, Google rewrote AngularJS and launched Angular 2 in 2016—a completely new, TypeScript-based framework with a component-based architecture and improved performance. Since then, Angular has continuously evolved, with major updates like the Ivy rendering engine (Angular 9) and ongoing optimizations for speed and developer experience. The latest Angular version is Angular 18, released on May 22, 2024.
Apps You Can Build Using Angular
Angular is a powerful development tool. Teams can utilize the language to build mobile apps, progressive web applications (PWAs), hybrid apps, and cross-platform apps. The framework is well-known for its ability to make efficient and visually appealing apps by integrating with frameworks like NativeScript and Ionic.
While native applications offer the best performance and device-specific optimizations, Angular-based solutions balance development speed, scalability, and user experience.
Single-Page Applications (SPA)
Single-page applications are one of the most popular website solutions out there. Companies often use them to create a fluid and engaging user experience. Unlike the default method of loading entire new web browsers, SPAs use fresh data from the web server to dynamically rewrite the existing web. Angular’s feature of data management and routing allows developers to build SPAs with ease without compromising the web’s performance.
Enterprise Web Apps
Angular is favored for enterprise web apps for an array of reasons. To begin with, Angular makes managing complex enterprise-level apps easier thanks to its scalable and structured approach. Next, despite the numerous component files, Angular’s CLI (Command Line Interface) minimizes the file sizes to ensure the best performance of high-load enterprise web apps. The framework is also secure and unified in architecture, allowing developers to keep the project in neat order.
Angular Mobile App Development
Angular mobile apps are developed with Angular as the front-end framework. Developers use Angular with frameworks like Ionic or NativeScript to create mobile apps that work across multiple platforms. This framework can be combined with NativeScript to develop fully native iOS and Android apps, improving responsiveness and scalability. Developers can create seamless and high-performing mobile applications by leveraging Angular’s state management, code reusability, and security features.
Progressive Web Applications (PWA)
A PWA solution looks and feels like a mobile app but actually operates on a web browser. In other words, PWAs can function as a webpage or mobile app on any device. It provides users with a native-like experience without the hassle of downloading and installing the application. Angular speeds up the process of building PWAs while still providing a smooth and reliable experience for users.
Server-side Rendered (SSR) Apps
As its name suggests, server-side rendered apps render the HTML content on the server rather than on the browser. When the server renders the JavaScript and sends a fully generated page to the client (browser), the JavaScript bundle on the client activates to make the Single Page Application (SPA) interactive. This means users see the content immediately.
Angular Universal is a tool that helps developers implement Server-Side Rendering (SSR) in Angular apps more easily. It pre-renders pages on the server before sending them to the browser, improving performance and SEO.
Interfaces with Beautiful Animations
To gain a competitive edge, many organizations incorporate animations into their websites. However, if not done properly, animations will do more harm than good – being laggy or choppy, inconsistent timing, or excessive effects cause users a great deal of frustration. Businesses risk losing many potential customers due to bad animation. 88% of online shoppers claim that following a negative user experience, they would never visit a website again, so the cost of bad UX is high.
Angular has a built-in animation module (@angular/animations), making it easy to create fluid transitions, interactive elements, and engaging user experiences, which will take care of all the issues mentioned above.
Top Benefits of Angular
Now that we have a clear understanding of what Angular is and its capabilities, it’s time to dig in even further to understand the advantages of Angular and why it is so popular in the front-end framework community.
MVVM and Modular Design for Scalable Apps
Angular follows the Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) architecture. This MVVM within a modular architecture of Angular contributes to the scalability and maintainability of the apps.
- MVVM architecture helps with data management and UI binding
- Modularity helps with scalability and code organization.
Modular structures encourage Angular developers to create their components and services. These components are the building blocks of the app. Each component is self-sufficient (well-encapsulated), meaning it contains its own logic, template (HTML), and styles (CSS). As a result, they’re reusable and can be combined or nested. They also have a strict hierarchy.
The biggest business benefit of Angular’s modular structure is its high level of customization and shorter time to market, while the app is scalable and easily maintainable.
Automatic Synchronization with Two-Way Data Binding
Closely related to Angular’s MVVM, two-way data binding makes sure the UI (view) and the underlying data (model) are synched automatically. When developers make a change, the model is instantly updated accordingly.
Similarly, when there are changes in the model, the UI immediately reflects this change without any extra code needed. This prompts a faster development cycle as developers don’t need to update the UI manually every time there are updates, saving the team a lot of time and unwanted errors. This feature also makes Angular apps more dynamic and easier to maintain.
TypeScript Support
TypeScript – a superset of JavaScript, helps fetch and manage data from a backend (server) without manually writing complex code for handling requests and responses. Not only does this boost productivity, but it also is useful in boosting productivity and spotting errors. TypeScript keeps the code clean and less error-prone. While some might argue that an average project wouldn’t benefit much from this feature, automatically spotting and eliminating errors is great for keeping enterprise apps’ codebase in check.
Asynchronous Programming
Reactive Extensions for JavaScript, or RxJS, is a powerful library that lies at the heart of Angular. It handles asynchronous operations and event-based programming. By using Promises and Observables from RxJS, Angular can perform many different tasks at once without slowing down or freezing the user experience.
Asynchronous programming creates responsive apps and a fluid user experience. Even when the app is in the middle of updating, it’s still available for users to use.
Testing Made Easy
Early Debugging
Angular provides its users with built-in functions to make testing and debugging easier. Angular’s TestBed provides users with an environment to test components and services. This testing utility facilitates easy unit testing and allows developers to simulate Angular modules in a test environment.
Angular’s Dependency Injection
Simply put, dependency Injection (DI) in Angular is a design pattern that automatically provides components with the services and resources they need. Instead of a component creating its dependencies, Angular injects them from the outside, making the code more modular, reusable, and easier to test. As a result, testing is less complex, and the app is more maintainable as components are loosely coupled.
Robust Ecosystem
Having been around for 15 years, it only makes sense that Angular’s resources are rich and comprehensive. In addition to the framework’s own documents, you can easily find helpful resources provided by the framework’s supportive community. If one ever gets lost in the sea of packages, add-ons, plug-ins, and development tools, Angular Resources offers a helpful guide to navigate them. These resources also provide insight into tolling, IDEs, data libraries, and so on.
Angular Material Design
Angular Material is a User Interface (UI) component library for developers that uses Google’s Material Design guidelines. It provides users with a range of elements, including pop-ups, navigation elements, buttons, indicators, pre-installed databases, etc., for web apps and mobile apps. They’re designed to integrate seamlessly with Angular apps. Not only does the Angular team constantly update the components of Material Desing, but they also take into consideration how users might interact with the app to create the most fluid and eye-catching user experience.
Productivity Boost
Angular is known for its dynamic apps and high performance. Multiple factors contribute to this performance boost.
- Dependency management: Angular’s hierarchical dependency injection reduces unnecessary processing by organizing dependencies into a structured tree.
- Angular Universal for faster rendering: Angular Universal pre-renders pages on the server to enable server-side rendering (SSR) for Angular applications, improving SEO, load speed, and user experience in general.
- Optimized code with Ivy Renderer: Angular’s Ivy renderer compiles templates into lightweight JavaScript, eliminating unused code (tree shaking) and improving load speeds.
- Smaller bundles with differential loading: Angular creates separate bundles (in other words, different versions) for modern and legacy browsers, reducing load times and optimizing performance for different users.
Angular Limitations
Despite numerous attractive benefits, Angular isn’t perfect. There are five main drawbacks that teams need to be aware of when choosing this frontend framework.
Steep Learning Curve
Mastering Angular can be challenging, even for developers with prior experience with JavaScript. New developers need to catch up with an array of new concepts: TypeScript, components, dependency injection, services, etc. Even though basic concepts like RxJS are required for every Angular developer, this library’s error message is often viewed as too cryptic to understand.
Migrating Legacy Systems from AngularJS to Angular
Angular JS was the first version of Angular, but it was discontinued in 2012. Migrating from AngularJS to Angular is often a complex endeavor for a number of reasons.
Angular is a complete rewrite of AngularJS - which uses TypeScript instead of JavaScript.
- Developers often have to manually refactor their AngularJS code into Angular components and modules.
- Despite offering better performance, the migration process can slow development due to debugging, testing, and learning new concepts.
- Some teams use a hybrid approach with AngularJS and Angular running side by side using tools like ngUpgrade, but this might add complexity in maintaining two frameworks.
Despite these challenges, migrating the legacy system is a necessary move for those who are relying on legacy systems for long-term benefits.
Angular’s Verbose Nature
Another common complaint about Angular is its verbosity. In other words, developers need to write more code lines than other frameworks like React or Vue. While the modular architecture is one of Angular’s benefits, it also has its disadvantages. Each component is complicated to manage. For example, a single component typically requires a TypeScript file for logic, an HTML file for the template, a dependency injection, and a module file to declare it within the app. Developers spend lots of time repeating the same tasks.
SEO Limitations
Angular is known for building great SPAs. However, since single-page web applications rely on client-side rendering, they’re often not SEO-friendly. Search engines like Google or Bing may struggle to fully index the content, which affects the website’s ranking. Companies who wish to follow the traditional SEO route might not opt for Angular.
However, tools like Angular Universal can solve this problem by pre-rendering pages.
Final Note
All in all, Angular offers attractive benefits with an extensive set of tools to build dynamic and responsive applications. Even though the framework takes time to get used to and master, its features and advantages are worth investing time and effort in.
With the right team and expertise, you’re already halfway to success. Orient Software’s dedicated team is ready to bring your Angular app, or any other project, to life. Reach out to Orient Software today!
Writer
Writer
