It seems to me that AMP is so divisive on HN that whenever it comes up both sides continue to draw their battle lines and regurgitate the same arguments. Every AMP discussion I see on here is less of a conversation between sides and more of each side talking at each other. It seems to me there are 3 separate debates that end up getting all mixed together: 1. The user experience of AMP 2. The technical details of AMP 3. The concern about google abusing its market dominance in an anticompetitive way (or not, depending which side you fall on)
I'd like to add a bit of my own personal experience with AMP, focusing entirely on the first point of user experience. I'll admit that I have had a more negative experience with AMP.
A little background about me: I work in embedded systems, so although I am probably more technical than most users, I have very little knowledge of things at the browser level. I know virtually nothing of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I feel like that puts me squarely in the "user" category rather than the "people having technical discussions about AMP" category. I do quite a bit of browsing on my phone, an iPhone 5s that is always kept current with the iOS updates.
The things I love about AMP: - Like you said "the speed is good." AMP really has sped up the page load and rendering experience. Whatever technical details are used to accomplish this (caching, prefetch, etc?), it truly is noticeable to me how quickly AMP pages load. - I have experienced website bloat issues for years, both on mobile and desktop. Whether it is images or text jumping around as a page loads or pop ups, banner images, and bloated ads that make the web page hard to use. Even though I have always heard discussions about how this should be fixed, AMP is actually achieving it.
The things I dislike: The things I strongly dislike about AMP can be addressed through the other part of your comment
> whatever problems the client has on iOS, it's been great on Android
As an iOS user, the AMP experience has been horrible for me. It's not that AMP is 'bad' or 'unusable' on iOS, it's that AMP imposes its own UI rules that are jarring on iOS. Having regularly used other google apps on iOS (gmail, maps, calendar) it feels like AMP is another part of google's "material design is the one true way" mentality.
On an iPhone the system and third party apps are generally very consistent in the placement of menus, back buttons, share buttons, etc as well as what they look like and how they function. Likewise, the gestures and navigation follow some general patterns: pages scroll up and down; swiping right and left are forward and back motions. Headers and footers tend to auto hide when scrolling up and down. And so on.
In google apps on an iPhone you get the Android/Material Design version of things. Buttons have different shapes. The menu in google apps is the hamburger icon instead of a button that says 'menu' or 'options.' Likewise there is no 'done' or 'back' button, only an 'x' button. Pages don't scroll in google apps, and the vertical flow is nonexistent. Instead pages are flipped through by swiping left and right, just like the android app drawer. For a great example of this compare google calendar app on iOS to the native iPhone calendar app.
On a web page those things don't matter. The browser's header (URL bar) and footer (navigation bar) autohide when scrolling. Give a good swipe left to go back a page in your browsing history. A good swipe right to go forward in your history. Even Firefox on iOS implements these same patterns. AMP manages to break those. It somehow prevents autohiding, so now I perpetually have safari's URL bar and navigation bar wasting space on my screen. AMP provides its own menu header bar as well. But it is wonky and auto hides or unhides at seemingly the slightest tap, jumping around and wasting more screen space. Likewise, once I am on an AMP page safari's swipe left and right gestures are broken. Swiping left doesn't being me back a page (back to the google search results); it brings me to new AMP page. Swiping right doesn't bring me forward a page in my browser history; it brings me to a new AMP page. My forward and backwards navigation gestures have been hijacked, thus trapping me in AMP-land until I explicitly tap safari's back button or the 'x' button on AMP's header bar. On top of that, the swipe gestures are incredibly sensitive on AMP compared to normal safari and iOS usage. Often I find myself scrolling down an AMP page not-quite-perfectly-vertically and accidentally jumping to a new article because I am so unused to the AMP-specific swipe sensitivity.
At least they finally added the ability to get the native article URL, which was infuriating when AMP first came on the scene and was a big complaint of mine in the past. And now Apple is implementing their fix for the share button with the URLs as well.
At the end of the day though, why can't I disable AMP? Why is there no way for me to click through to the native web page from the google search results? My experience as an iOS user with AMP pages has been overwhelmingly negative, but consistently from google and the AMP team I see some form of "well users overwhelmingly love it and it makes pages load faster." That's great. I don't love it though. I hate it. Please let me disable it, and please stop forcing AMP down my throat, breaking my browser's behavior in the process. Please stop imposing Material Design aesthetics within AMP. I am not browsing the web on through a google platform. Please stop trying to 'fix' that for me.
If I had a way to disable AMP I wouldn't feel so strongly negative about it. But instead I am left with the notion from google "AMP is good. See, users love it. You're wrong if you don't as well. Thus there's no need to disable it, ever."