As part of our continuous effort to focus and deliver the best search & discovery developer experience, Algolia has made the decision to deprecate the Angular InstantSearch package.

This decision was not made lightly: we want to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of the reasons behind it, the impact on your projects, and how you can transition smoothly to alternative solutions.

Challenges with Angular v16 and Angular InstantSearch

The release of Angular v16 has introduced several notable challenges:

• Removal of View Engine: The complete transition to Ivy and the removal of the View Engine have introduced significant compatibility issues for projects that depended on the old rendering engine.
• Removal of Angular Compatibility Compiler: The elimination of ngcc has further compounded these compatibility challenges, affecting many existing projects.
• Potential for Future Breaking Changes: The framework’s evolving features are likely to continue introducing unexpected breaking changes, necessitating further updates to our library and potentially disrupting current implementations.

These challenges significantly impact our ability to maintain and support Angular InstantSearch. Frequent breaking changes in the evolving framework disrupt our library’s functionality, causing instability in Angular versions for long-term use and leads to lagging in feature parity compared to other libraries. As a result, keeping up with the rapid pace of changes in Angular becomes increasingly difficult, making it harder to ensure a stable and consistent user experience for our customers.

Given these challenges, we have decided to deprecate the Angular InstantSearch package. This decision will allow us to better allocate our resources towards vanilla JavaScript implementations and other packages, ensuring we provide the best support and features for our customers.

Using InstantSearch.js within Angular Applications

We strongly recommend transitioning to InstantSearch.js. By using InstantSearch.js, customers will no longer be blocked by our version support, as InstantSearch.js is agnostic of the Angular version being used. This library is also significantly lighter, helping improve the performance and loading times of your applications.

To assist you with this transition, we have developed detailed guides to help you integrate InstantSearch.js into your Angular applications:

• How-To Guide: Step-by-step instructions for setting up and using InstantSearch.js in an Angular application.
• Migration Guide: Detailed steps to transition from Angular InstantSearch to InstantSearch.js.

For additional information and support, please refer to our FAQs and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have further questions!