Why AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is Here to Stay
A past, present and future look at the AMP project
Will Accelerated Mobile Pages take over the web? A complicated, and highly opinionated topic distressing the dev community. There is a lot of ‘suspicion’ that AMP is an evil, Google initiative to take over and control the entire web.
As a software company in the web development industry — we’re very receptive and interested in new web technologies and the impact they have on the dev community. Since AMP is one of the technologies that drives our software solution (AMPize.me) we decided to make a general analysis of AMP’s story.
How and Why did Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Start?
Back in 2015, the mobile web sucked. It was slow and difficult to load pages, and mobile web browsers were simply not ‘up to speed’. During this time, FaceBook created Instant Articles and Apple created Apple News — which were both fast, and solved the immediate problem (speed). According to The Verge at the time, these solutions were like walled gardens, because they seemed nice, but limited the freedom for publishers as they were proprietary publishing systems under the control of huge corporations.
Instant Articles and Apple News took users further away from the open web and deeper into the app ecosystem, while simultaneously forcing businesses to work with apps rather than utilizing the open web. As quoted by The Verge in 2015, ‘Apple and Facebook are turning their backs on the web to build replacements for the web, and with them replacements for HTML and CSS and every bit of web innovation it’s taken 20 years of competitive development to achieve’. According to The Verge, Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles were simply a sad refutation of the open web revolution.
At this point in time, Google started their own open-source initiative called The AMP Project to make the web better for everyone. Since Google is a web-search-engine company, it is in their best interest for the open web to be thriving. If users and businesses were to abandon the web and start solely using apps — Google Search would basically go out of business.
So yes, in accordance with certain discrepancies regarding The AMP Project, it was a response by Google to the competitive threat of Facebook and Apple, but also served as an initiative to protect everyone from being condemned to the app-marketplace, and to keep the open web alive — which we, as developers, think is very important.
What are the problems associated with AMP?
Ironically, while the AMP Project was created as a system for making the web better for all, there has been some controversy about it from the developer community. Here we will address the main concerns caused by AMP:
#1) That Google is ‘stealing’ the traffic of websites who adopt AMP by hosting their websites in the AMP cache and displaying a Google URL on the articles. When navigating from Google Search, AMP URLs look something like this: https://www.google.com/amp/www.example.com/amp.doc.html
Because AMP is a user-first web solution, one of the features that users wanted were increased privacy. To answer this demand, every AMP page features privacy preserved pre-rendering which pre-renders pages without allowing the site owner to set cookies and collect data about users who never actually clicked onto the site. As explained by the AMP technical lead, privacy reasons make it basically impossible to load the page from the publisher’s server — this means that AMP pages (when accessed from Google search) must display the Google AMP URL. This issue has been acknowledged by the AMP team, and is currently being resolved.
#2) The reward system for AMP — Google ‘favoured’ AMP pages in search results, which put pressure on businesses to adopt the technology or otherwise not appear in things like Rich Cards.
AMP Logo / Reward system — Even though Google had previously been encouraging publishers to speed up their site, and even offering free improvement mechanisms, developers continued to make slow loading websites. By having the AMP logo, and ‘Rich Search Results’ such as the News Carousel, Google was able to create an incentive system for publishers to get on board with modern performance standards. Critics state this is forcing businesses to adopt the technology. Google released a blog that they are prepared to offer the same ‘rewards’ and support to non-AMP content as long as it follows a set of web standards and meets a set of objective performance and user experience criteria.
*If a company wants to benefit from the AMP technology, without having ties to Google, companies can use the AMP framework to build a website and remove the top-level AMP markup in the html tag. This way, Google will no longer consider your page as an AMP page, but it will continue to meet these different criteria, and get rewarded for doing so.
#3) The Governance System — Upon launching AMP, Malte Ubl was the sole director of the project, however following a recent announcement, the governance of the AMP Project will change in order to give a voice to all constituents of the community, including those who cannot contribute code themselves, such as end-users.
What have been the results of using AMP?
The AMP Project value system has always been centered around prioritizing the end user experience. Unfortunately, sometimes what the end-users want causes some problems for the development and/or a marketing teams, such as point #1 above regarding the URLs / privacy preserved pre-rendering problem.
On the bright side however, there have been some great success stories from businesses who have adopted AMP which include things like decreased bounce rate, higher traffic, better search ranking, and much more. In fact, Google is not the only search platform with AMP. Bing has since adopted it, as well as Chinese search engine, Baidu.
What is the Future of AMP?
The Future of AMP involves the continuous creation of excellent user experiences on the web. The continued goal of the AMP project is to achieve a user-first web, which means standardizing the work motivated by AMP with the W3C.
We believe AMP will continue to grow, as an open web framework. It is important to know that AMP isn’t about bringing more traffic to Google Search, and is rather about keeping users on the open-web, and pushing the development community to make better websites.
If fellow developers can take AMP as a framework, rather than a Google incentive — they will be able to see the goodness that it provides, and appreciate the benefits.
