I’ve been reluctant to change. It’s such a disruption from my standard workflow, it’s like learning Nextjs/React all over again.

I did find many of the new features intriguing though. I’m also finding that many of my favorite libraries are slow to catching up with the app router. There are also some changes that are downright unacceptable, like the complete replacement of next/router with next/navigation. In order to duplicate the router events feature of the pages router I had to write a bunch of code to reinvent the wheel.

I feel like we already had most of the features everyone loves about Nextjs 13. We have next/dynamic which is an extension of Reacts suspense feature. And we have the SWR package which provides a similar data fetching experience as the app router. I think Vercel basically just incorporated SWR right into the code base and voila we have the app router.

I’m reasonably certain, though, that Vercel will likely deprecate the pages router in the next major release.