AMP isn't popular because users love it. It's popular because Google shows AMP-only results for the first screen (often two or more screens) of search results on their site. You can make as beautiful an experience as you want, but users won't see it when they search, so they won't ever get to experience it.
The problem is all the people and big websites that don't seem to care at all about their own content pushing amp as some sort of great solution for website speed. Sad, but it seems to have died down.
Right now nine of the first ten results for "Walmart shooting" in incognito mode stock Chrome on Android, are AMP articles.
Do that search, if you're not seeing those AMP articles then you're doing something very unusual with your setup.
So major news outlets are still on the AMP bandwagon? And they complain about revenue...
They don't have a choice. If they aren't then Google won't show them, and they won't get any traffic.
Reddit uses AMP. If you search via Google for a Reddit thread, you'll get an AMP link. I sometimes see Redditors posting AMP links to other Reddit threads, presumably because Google search is more effective than Reddit's own search.
> or if it's not time sensitive, it will be in the news 2-3 weeks later, at which point it's probably worth reading
Google shows AMP for all search results, not just the current-news carousel. If I search for 'Sandy Hook shooting' on my phone, I see a Wikipedia onebox, the first search result which is Wikipedia (no AMP), a handful of news articles from the last few weeks, and then the remainder of the actual search results: a Business Insider article from December 2018 (AMP), an ABC article from 2014 (AMP), a Reuters article from a few weeks ago (AMP), an NBC article from a few weeks ago (AMP), a CBS News article from 2017 (AMP), a Britannica article (no AMP), and two YouTube videos (no AMP).
I tried that search, none are AMP for me. Tried "walmart shooting", none are AMP, even CNN live updates. Android/Firefox.
Tried Chrome, not signed into Google, no AdBlock, still No AMP.
Strange... May be Internet speed related?
Since then I’ve only seen two more. All three time I’ve clicked away almost immediately.
I think the reason I don’t see them much is because I don’t use google for search often, and I never use google news.
Users search for news/article content with Google because the experience is qualitatively better than many of the alternatives. If there was a news website that showed trending and search-based results (and there are several), the presentation of the article after SERP clickthru would still need to be comparable.
Facebook did a more AMP-like thing of migrating the article content onto Facebook, providing the least offensive (if you are already using Facebook) presentation.
News websites in 2019 almost all auto-play video upon load and many times the video is unrelated to the article content. They load clickbait partner links in the footer. They still have dozens of ad networks and tracking beacons sprinkled on every page. I can't reliably trust my ad blockers and tracking beacon blockers or Reader Mode to work all of the time.
As much as I would like competition with Google+AMP and Facebook+articles, the current state of the web is gross and these two clean it up a little.
I'd expect the Safari feature to work quite similar.
I really don't think this is the reason Google had spent millions on making this.
A more realistic explanation is tvis situation gave someone the idea and management accepted it as it would give them yet another way to corner the market.
There's a real Stockholm syndrome prevalent here. Is the request so unreasonable?
And it's even worse. I browse with NoScript, no JS by default. Often I'm presented with a blank web page. I simply do View -> Page Style -> No Style in Firefox and usually I get a perfectly readable page.
Which means that countless sites go out of their way to be hostile to people not using JS. That's now acceptable?