Angular 22 Makes Signal Forms and Angular Aria Stable, Defaults New Components to OnPush, and Requires TypeScript 6
Angular's June 3 release graduates Signal Forms, Asynchronous Signals, and Angular Aria to stable, flips the default change-detection strategy to OnPush, and ships with Vitest as the default test runner.
Overview
The Angular team released version 22 of its web framework on June 3, 2026, according to the project’s official v22 event page, whose changelog reference marks the release as 2200-2026-06-03. The update consolidates several reactivity features that had spent prior cycles in experimental or developer-preview status, promoting them to stable, and changes a long-standing default in how components detect and render updates.
What We Know
The headline of the release is the stabilization of Angular’s signal-based APIs. Per the official v22 page, “Signal Forms, Asynchronous Signals, and Angular Aria are now stable, offering a production-ready reactive foundation.” Signal Forms is the framework’s signal-driven approach to form state, and Angular Aria provides accessible UI component patterns.
The framework’s release notes confirm the same graduation at the API level. The v22.0.0 entry in the Angular CHANGELOG records a feature to “graduate signal forms APIs to public API,” moving them out of experimental scope.
The release also changes the default change-detection behavior for components. According to the Angular CHANGELOG, “Component with undefined changeDetection property are now OnPush by default. Specify changeDetection: ChangeDetectionStrategy.Eager to keep the previous behavior.” OnPush narrows the conditions under which Angular re-checks a component, an approach better aligned with the framework’s signal-based reactivity; developers who depend on the prior always-check behavior must now opt back into it explicitly.
Two other defaults shift in v22. The HTTP client now uses the Fetch API rather than XMLHttpRequest; the CHANGELOG advises developers to “Use the HttpXhrBackend with provideHttpClient(withXhr) if you want to keep supporting upload progress reports.” On the testing side, new projects are now scaffolded around Vitest. The Angular testing guide states that it “covers the default testing setup for new Angular CLI projects, which uses Vitest,” handled through the @angular/build:unit-test builder.
The release raises the framework’s toolchain floor as well. The CHANGELOG notes that “TypeScript versions older than 6.0 are no longer supported,” meaning projects upgrading to Angular 22 must move to TypeScript 6.
What We Don’t Know
The official materials reviewed here describe which APIs reached stable status and which defaults changed, but they do not quantify performance gains for OnPush-by-default or the Fetch-based HTTP client, nor do they detail the full migration burden for large existing applications moving off the previous change-detection default. Adoption metrics for Signal Forms relative to Angular’s older reactive-forms system are likewise not provided in the cited sources.
Analysis
Angular 22 reads less as a feature dump than as a line in the sand: the framework’s signal-based model, introduced piecemeal over recent releases, is now the supported, default-on path for forms, reactivity, and change detection. By making OnPush the default for new components and shipping Vitest as the standard test runner, the release nudges new projects toward the patterns the team has been building toward, while leaving explicit opt-outs — ChangeDetectionStrategy.Eager, provideHttpClient(withXhr) — for code that relies on the older behavior.