Google AMP, My Take
Personally I think Google AMP is a travesty. It is pitched as a way to speed up content delivery on mobile, which it undoubtedly achieves. However, it does this by bullying you into having to do it, as you will be penalised in search results for not having an AMP version of your content. It is not Google's role to police the Worldwide Web. Stopping publishers from jamming their pages with ads, etc and slowing down their pages. Improving this situation should be driven by market forces, and not what Google thinks. What is wrong with responsive design? Google AMP feels like the bad old days of building WML pages.
Personally I think Google AMP is a travesty.
Google AMP is limited, it does not allow you to do lots of things that a modern publisher would like to be able to do. A good example of this is real-time updates. There is nothing in the current standard that will support live updates in an article, there is just an issue on GitHub which has some underwhelming suggestions. If you want to do this in standard HTML, no problem there are several options as long as you can scale your infrastructure. This is one of my main issues, that of no competitive advantage. If you have a great idea you want to deliver and you want to put it in front of your growing mobile audience then if AMP doesn't support it then you are going to have to make suggestions to the specification, and wait and see. This is terrible. AMP by its nature will always trail behind what can be done with HTML and JavaScript.
AMP adds another presentation you have to maintain. AMP doesn't replace the mobile representation of you pages, it adds another one. This means that a customer coming from a link in an email will end up on you standard HTML pages, whereas one coming from a Google search will see the AMP version. This adds a serious additional expense to publishers in design, development and testing. It also creates a confusing experience for customers.
AMP adds another presentation you have to maintain.
So coming back to my original point that this was pitched as a way to speed up content delivery on mobile. I actually do not believe Google at all on this. For me it is something they had to do in response to the advertising dollar land grabs made by Facebook with Instant Article, and Apple with Apple News. So my cynical view is that this is just a defensive manoeuvre by Google to protect its revenues.
By Simon BaynesSo my cynical view is that this is just a defensive manoeuvre by Google to protect its revenues.