As a user, I've found AMP results to be invariable an excellent user experience on mobile. I will always click an AMP link over a non-AMP link, when on mobile, because I know the AMP link will load quickly and be usable, and the odds are good the non-AMP link will not.
Apparently this is a minority view around here. :)
AMP is absolutely infuriating. I constantly share links via iOS extensions, for example Slack, and AMP gives me this ridiculous google.com link.
I've thought about building an adblock style blocking mechanism for these links. But it seems I'd end up blocking an increasingly large percentage of the search results.
The top bar in google AMP results is super annoying (and hidden url's are cherry on that, making it difficult to share url's correctly).
That said rendering speed of AMP is quite noticeably faster than navigating to the actual site - or at least for more popular tech oriented news type sites.
Hard to say what's better - but I say to hell with AMP and just let us see raw websites.
This AMP "feature" caused me to switch my entire search engine on mobile. In other words, you have to disable it by not using Google.
I can understand how the aspect of the control Google has over AMP isn't ideal but you can't deny AMP sites are a great user experience on mobile. Pages tend to load for me in less than 0.5 seconds even on my mobile connection. For other sites, pages can take 10 to 30 seconds to load, have pop-ups, image loading causes the page the jump up/down etc.
Making sites with small download sizes and quick rendering is a very involved process. Google have made a tool and set of guidelines that force developers to use current best practices in a way you're just not going to get by hoping all developers everywhere do it themselves. It's also a much easier sell to management (i.e. "Is our site AMP compatible?") compared to trying to push for each individual best practice to be followed which can individually only have a small benefit.
My SO is a non-tech user and she hates the AMP bar so much that's fixed and covers significant screen space (on iphone 6) and it reverts to google search page when she clicks X button because she thought it'll hide that bar.
The place to complain about AMP isn't Google... it's the sites that AMP-enable their content. If enough people tell publishers "I've stopped reading your site because of AMP" maybe they'll take notice.
As many other people, I've also had my fair share of issues with AMP. On top of the ethical issues, the thing to finally make me fed up with it was the fact that I couldn't even load 20% of the search results on my iPhone being connected to a 1000/300 landline connection via wifi.
Kind of a self-defeating thing that they claim to make the web universally better and then force everyone to use technology that is clearly broken on so many search pages and then actively try and prevent you from using the old, actually working links.
Needless to say, I'm currently using DuckDuckGo on all of my mobile devices and am considering switching to it on my computers as well. It baffles me that Google gets away with the things they've been doing recently. I used to be really happy they exist, now I kinda wish they had tougher competition and weren't in many de-facto monopolistic positions. Other than the fact that they barely support anything they offer, be it "free" or paid products, they change and shut down projects almost monthly.
They are slowly turning Chrome into a walled garden going so far as to remove your own, manually installed extensions when they don't like what you're using. They ruined hangouts, which was a really great, even standout VOIP platform that offered not only the convenience of being browser-based, but all these plugins that would come in handy while producing content (like volume adjustments on participants and an export feature, for podcasting or D&D) or drawing boards or group YouTube video playback. They messed up mobile search with AMP, in an effort to dominate the web even more. They shut down Panoramio. They promised to fix Android for years and even 6 years after it became mainstream, the experience is noticeably less smooth than the competition, etcetcetc.
Using a Google product is only recommended if you're not planning on investing into a long-term future it seems.
Unfortunately, however convenient it was to rely on a single platform, for now I think possible solution is to look for alternatives and show our dislike by hitting them where it hurts: their install base.
To be clear, this is referring to the client side--that is, from the perspective of mobile web searchers, you can't ask Google to hide AMP results from the results page.
To my knowledge, publishers still have to opt into participating in Google AMP, and I assume they can opt out? That was my fear in reading the headline--that publisher participation in AMP is irrevocable, which would be bad.
AMP was the thing that finally got me to stop using Google on my phone. Quite the accomplishment.
Perhaps AMP would improve my browsing experience if it actually worked, but I've only ever gotten a blank page when clicking on an AMP link.
I've always wanted a browser extension, perhaps built on Decentraleyes[1], which replaces the amp code with code that drops ads and trackers and just shows text and images. For bonus points you could look at httpseverywhere[2] and transform the google.com cached urls back to the originals.
Alas, it's rare to find a phone browser that supports extensions.
The thing about AMP is that it takes work. You cannot just install an AMP plugin and expect your existing website to suddenly serve AMP.
However, with certain CMS's, that's exactly how things are marketed. So what we're seeing is people go off and buy themes or whatever to make their website look the way they want, then they install some plugin and say "done". And then they are taken by surprise when, on mobile, their site either doesn't load at all, or looks nothing like the "premium theme" they paid for.
FWIW, I'm glad I moved my blog to AMP. I feel like it loads pretty well instantly on and I feel somewhat future proofed.
Would I encourage a less technical user to go through this? Not really.
Also, I wish Google would work better with integrating their own tooling. Getting lower scores on Google Pagespeed after enabling AMP because of the AMP CDN configuration is somewhat absurd.
I'm glad they fixed this. It has been driving me insane.
I also wonder in general when they have canonical links set up what the statistics will look like on interactions with them. I understand what AMP is trying to achieve with site performances, and its great for some mediums specifically the simple reading of news, but it's dummying down the internet. Personally I hope that people get bored of the AMP experience and click to the more feature rich website experience(that obviously don't have terrible site performance).
Like the other commenters here, I really disliked amp for a variety of reason such as the bar on top and the inability to easily link the main version of the page. However, I'be come to feel that we've brought this on ourselves as Web developers by making every website incredibly bloated and only possible to use on high speed connections. I've spent the past month in thailand on a much slower connection and the only sites I can reliably use currently are text sites like hacker news and amp pages. I can have a site like reddit even take 30-40 seconds to load and more complicated sites like cnn will load part of the page and then silently fail on me.
AMP is not a great solution, but it is at least _a_ solution, when the industry was not taking steps to fix the problem themselves