You are partially right... partially wrong.. You lose control for it only when you use ng-repeat.. you could alternately write your own repeat directive that does animations for adding or removing.. If your are not yet in a state to write this level of a directive yourself, you still have a few options. I remember someone had written a fadey directive that does fading animation, there is also a fork which does animation with ng-repeat. And if you can wait, this fork will be merged into the core angular , hopefully soon...