What is the future direction of Apollo Gateway compared to Apollo Router?

Apollo has been consistent in its guidance: Apollo Router is the actively developed, recommended runtime for federation going forward, and Apollo Gateway is in maintenance mode.

Gateway still receives compatibility and security fixes, and existing production deployments continue to work, but new federation capabilities — native subscriptions, Apollo Connectors for wrapping REST APIs, advanced Router-only directives, and the coprocessor extension model — are being built for Router first, or exclusively for Router.

For teams currently on Gateway, Apollo's own guidance is to plan a migration path, particularly for graphs that are performance-sensitive, expected to be long-lived, or likely to need newer Federation spec features, since there's no guarantee those features land in Gateway at all going forward. Both runtimes can consume the same supergraph schema format, which keeps the actual migration effort mostly about swapping the runtime rather than rewriting subgraphs.