I wasn't expecting the examples of its usage to involve altering the UI on AMP pages!
Is it just part of the blessed AMP WordPress plugin? Or is google actually injecting their own UI into AMP pages by default?
If the latter, that would seem like a power grab. Sure, it's "just a toolbar." And search results and adwords ads are "just links."
Yes. Google doesn’t actually link to AMP articles, but caches them on their own servers, modifies the markup, or removes non-compliant ad networks, and serves that to the actual user.
The web is supposed to be a platform, and AMP is supposed to be an open standard ... but the end result of this is that Google Search will modify your web application with their own navigation UI?
Yikes. I mean, injecting your stuff into other people's web pages is bad when a cable provider uses it for ads. Is it not bad for the web platform if it's google that does it?
Or is it linked to your usage of their CDN, and not something that necessarily comes with being an AMP site? (Ie, google will cache it for you, but first you have to agree to let them inject your page). That wouldn't be so bad, because it'd mean that you could play in the AMP playground without agreeing to Google having their fingers in your users' navigation.
But if AMP means "Google-injected UI" right now, then that just seems bad.
If Google indexes a page with AMP, and returns is at as a search result, it NEVER actually returns the AMP page, but always the modified one from the cache.