Even if it didn't have all of the problems associated with it I just don't get the point. I don't need Google to repackage a website with less useability. It's frequently not even faster.
It's also much faster to render, which makes a huge difference on the crappy Android phones that are everywhere. Hell, I'm using a $200 Android phone right now because my iPhone broke and browsing the web is painful on it. And with the terrible hauwei $40 phones that have taken over Africa, most of the web is unusable.
I don't like Google's control of Amp, but it exists because of the original sin of html and js. Everything about html is terrible: bloated, pointlessly verbose, etc.
I have a dream that we all just start using Gopher and dump the www, but it's never going to happen. Maybe even browser vendors could get to together and design a super light weight markup based on S-exps or something, but that's probably not going to happen either. Amp is the best we got and it solves a real problem. And it solves the problem well.
I appreciate that not everyone has fast data, but not having data speed to read a basic web page is really becoming the exception, not the norm. Data transmission is getting cheaper and faster and available in more remote places every year.
I wouldn't have a huge problem with AMP if I could opt out. Unfortunately I can't. So despite my blazing fast unlimited plan on a flagship device, I'm getting served crippled pages with degraded performance. It's like I own a Ferrari kitted out with all the extras and Google is saying "here have you tried out this cool bicycle? It has special pedals so you can't go too fast and we reconfigured the handlebars so you don't accidentally do something like steering! It even has a bell. Ting-ting, ting-ting! How cool is that?"
In all seriousness, it is neat if it makes the web more useable for low-connectivity users, but maybe then limit AMP to those places (which are shrinking every year) and don't serve needlessly crippled pages when I'm standing in downtown Amsterdam or Hong Kong at the center of the internet, connected to blazing fast Wifi.
Huh? Yes. Hugely. I'm on my fast home internet using a new iPhone I bought two months ago, and loading a NYTimes article just took 8 seconds. God only knows if it's bounded by network or CPU or both, if the problem is frameworks or ads or what. And it isn't even "stuck" on anything -- I watch the blue loading bar in Safari move pretty smoothly across the top.
I did a search for a NYT article on Google, clicked it, and it appeared instantaneously.
That's an insane difference. I know everyone hates AMP here, but when I've got my user hat on rather than my developer hat... it's unbelievably more performant.
But even if I can load both pages at roughly the same time AMP experience is just so much better, they always load at the very least at the same speed as the original website, there's no weird scrolling implemented, there's no annoying popups, etc.
I always choose AMP pages when possible, compared to the "native" ones - because I know for a fact that I'll get fast loading, and other stuff mentioned above.