Technology lifecycle: which technologies are losing developers
Which databases, frameworks and tools are losing momentum, what is replacing them, and what that means if your product depends on them. Not every downward trend means “dead”.
The short version
The largest year-on-year fall in the top 15 on DB-Engines, now rank 11 with a score of 100. OpenSearch (+20.6%), its open-source fork, is absorbing much of that demand.
Downloads fell 3.0% last quarter, but W3Techs still finds jQuery on 70.0% of websites. “Declining” and “dead” are very different things.
Gulp (-11.3%), Grunt (-4.8%), Webpack (-3.9%) are all losing downloads as Vite and esbuild take over the bundler market.
The steepest decline of any major database. Low-code platforms and cloud databases are replacing Access for small-team data.
Declining databases
Year-on-year popularity change among the 30 most popular databases on DB-Engines.
Losing popularity (year on year)
Gaining instead Database trends →
Top-30 databases with the biggest year-on-year gains.
| Database | Rank | Model | Score | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Access | #17 | Relational | 65 | -31.9% |
| Elasticsearch | #11 | Multi-model | 100 | -22.3% |
| FileMaker | #24 | Relational | 29 | -21.0% |
| Amazon DynamoDB | #18 | Multi-model | 63 | -18.1% |
| SQLite | #12 | Relational | 96 | -15.9% |
| Google BigQuery | #19 | Relational | 52 | -13.8% |
| MySQL | #2 | Relational, Multi-model | 858 | -13.1% |
| SAP Adaptive Server | #25 | Relational, Multi-model | 25 | -12.1% |
| Microsoft SQL Server | #3 | Relational, Multi-model | 702 | -10.6% |
| IBM Db2 | #9 | Relational, Multi-model | 113 | -10.1% |
Source: DB-Engines Ranking, April 2026. Scores combine search interest, job postings, technical discussion and social mentions. Only databases ranked in the top 30 that fell more than 3% are shown.
Declining packages
npm packages losing weekly downloads.
| Package | Weekly downloads | Last quarter | vs spring 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| request (deprecated 2020) | 11.8M/wk | -15.9% | -22.9% |
| Gulp | 1.5M/wk | -11.3% | -9.7% |
| Angular | 3.8M/wk | -7.5% | -2.2% |
| Moment.js | 23.2M/wk | -6.1% | +0.3% |
| Mongoose | 3.4M/wk | -5.5% | +9.3% |
| Grunt | 771K/wk | -4.8% | +1.4% |
| Webpack | 31.4M/wk | -3.9% | +2.5% |
| jQuery | 15.5M/wk | -3.0% | +11.7% |
| NestJS | 11K/wk | -1.6% | -0.2% |
Source: npm registry download counts. “Last quarter” is the latest 13 weeks against the 13 before (weekly downloads are a 13-week average). The last column compares the latest 13 complete weeks (2025-W51–2026-W10) with the first 13 in our data (2025-W12–2025-W24): several “declining” packages are still above where they were a year ago, so this is a slowdown, not an exodus. Full data on the package ecosystem page.
Hiring signal: what startups stopped asking for
Technologies whose share of Hacker News hiring posts fell most between 2017 and 2024.
| Technology | Share of posts, 2017 | Share, 2024 | Relative change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Angular | 7.7% | 1.0% | -87% |
| PHP | 6.3% | 1.5% | -75% |
| Java | 27.1% | 8.1% | -70% |
| Ruby | 22.4% | 7.6% | -66% |
| Android | 9.0% | 3.1% | -66% |
| Docker | 9.9% | 4.1% | -58% |
| iOS | 12.0% | 5.5% | -54% |
| Swift | 2.8% | 1.5% | -44% |
Share of Hacker News “Who’s Hiring” posts that mention each technology. Using share rather than raw counts removes the overall drop in HN posting since 2018.
This data ends in February 2025. It shows long-run direction in startup hiring, not today’s market. For current demand, see the Talent Scarcity Index (US job postings, 2026).
Context matters
Why “declining” does not mean “dead”, and what to do about it.
Decline is not death
Every technology on this page is still running in production at thousands of companies. MySQL is down 13.1% on DB-Engines but is still the #2 database in the world with a score of 858. jQuery has been “dying” for a decade and still runs on 70.0% of websites. Decline measures momentum, not relevance.
What it means for hiring
Declining doesn't automatically mean cheaper or harder to staff. It depends on how fast developers are leaving compared with how fast the work is. Some fading stacks, like Angular, still have far more experienced developers than open roles; others stay hard to hire for. Check the current rate and hiring difficulty for your stack on its stack page or in the Talent Scarcity Index before planning around either assumption.
The build tool transition
The shift from Gulp, Grunt and Webpack to Vite and esbuild is one of the clearest technology transitions happening right now, driven largely by much faster development builds. If you’re on Webpack, migrating is straightforward, but there’s no emergency: Webpack still works and still receives security updates.
Database musical chairs
The database market is reshuffling, not shrinking. Elasticsearch (-22.3%) is losing ground partly to OpenSearch (+20.6%), its open-source fork. Microsoft Access (-31.9%) is being replaced by low-code platforms and cloud databases. Meanwhile PostgreSQL keeps gaining (+2.1%), Snowflake is up +29.3% and Databricks +51.6%.
If your product runs on a declining stack
Don’t panic, but plan. The current stack still has value, so there is rarely a reason for a big-bang rewrite. The people who help most are developers who know both the old and the new stack (jQuery and React, Webpack and Vite): they can keep the existing system stable while migrating it piece by piece. That combination is also the most in-demand kind of contract work.
Stuck maintaining a legacy stack?
We take over, stabilise and migrate older codebases: jQuery, AngularJS, Webpack-era builds, ageing databases. Tell us what you’re running and we’ll reply by email.
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