‎Amplosion: Redirect AMP Links on the App Store | Hacker News Reader

‎Amplosion: Redirect AMP Links on the App Store

apps.apple.com

351 pointstambourine_man151 comments

The best thing about this is that AMP links totally break “open this page in the website’s native app” links, which I encounter frequently, presumably because the browser is on an AMP proxy domain and thus the iOS native app URL listener doesn’t work. It’s absolutely shocking that such a core flow is completely broken by default when you’re coming from Google search results.

This app fixes this problem!

I would happily pay for an Open Source adblocker-style extension that intentionally breaks "do you want to download and install our app instead of using a perfectly reasonable web browser that you're in control of" pop-ups. If I don't already have the app installed, there's a reason for that.

(In general, an adblocker is one of the most valuable things I have installed. I wish EasyList had a subscription option; I'd happily pay to help support its maintenance.)

Not always the case. Sometimes I'm looking for something and come across a link to a reddit thread. I'd like to jump to the app easily. What I don't like, however, is how hard websites try to block you from accessing their website without opening the app first.

That's what I mean. If I have the app installed, I probably want to use it. If I don't have the app installed, I don't want the site trying to push me to install it; I just want the content in my browser tab.

And Reddit is indeed one of the worst offenders here.

Reddit hard blocks you on some subreddits from the default mobile page. You have to go to the app or go to <subdomain>.reddit.com to bypass the block.

Super super super super stupid. Like why block /r/popular from the web and force it to use the app?

I just don't look at Reddit on mobile.

Apollo is the answer. Reddit’s properties are a dumpster fire. Heck even the desktop version regularly starts playing some random video I scrolled past a minute ago… good luck finding it. Absolutely embarrassing “bugs” everywhere on Reddit, even before getting to the dark patterns.

I wish apollo had the option of turning off infinite scroll.

That's the main problem I have with "new reddit", as well: new reddit has infinite scroll, so I use old reddit, but old reddit doesn't have dark mode.

Apollo is also built by the same developer as this extension. Best Reddit client IMO.

I can suggest https://libredd.it/ on desktop (probably works well on mobile too) and Slide [1] on Android.

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/me.ccrama.redditslide/

Slide is great on iOS too.

Fair enough. I wish you had that option as well. But when I already have and use the apps, it’s pretty awful for Google to break links that certainly should open in those apps.

I block ads at the DNS level. Aside from 2-3 legitimate websites that broke as a result of this (because they use some Salesforce thing as a part of their site or similar), almost every unsubscribe link I get is now broken. I really wish there was some plug-in that would unroll those links to their final form since that’s usually fine but passes through 2-3 bukkshit redirects before it gets there.

I just send this kind of stuff to spam because I never subscribe to any mail newsletter.

Same. Do automatically opt-in newsletters really turn a profit?

I would think that for something like a newsletter, explicitly opting in would end up being more profitable, since if you’re sending an email with eg sendgrid it’s not free.

Can someone shed some light on the economics of newsletter spam?

Only in part: The marketing department needs numbers to report, newsletter subscription is one. So it pays at least one job.

I use http://wheregoes.com to manually follow any unsubscribe links that my hostfile blocks.

That's incredibly useful, thanks.

Thanks! A web extension based on this would be even better.

> If I don't already have the app installed, there's a reason for that.

For about 5 years now I've been actively going back to web pages for things.

Example: I no longer have the BBC News app installed. Instead I have a bookmark on my mobile home screen that goes to the BBC News web page.

What I've found is:

1. Most apps didn't need to be apps, there's nothing that they need access to that their web equivalent cannot already do.

2. The web pages are easier to control... i.e. Firefox on Android and ad-blocking is a joy.

3. Most of the web pages get richer experiences sooner than an app (if it ever gets an update), i.e. minisites on news sites around elections.

4. The web experiences are considerably faster on poorer networks.

5. The DNS logs show a massive reduction in tracking frameworks... even though the web is bloated, apps appear to also be bloated, but the web you can more easily control.

6. Better battery life across the board, probably due to nothing running in the background and no notifications being processed - also improved mental health as the device is now on my terms, pulling content when I want rather than being pushed it when an app wants to.

It's overall a far better experience.

> The web pages are easier to control... i.e. Firefox on Android and ad-blocking is a joy.

Sadly, adblocking and web in general is restricted in apple devices.

True.

On my iOS devices I used the NextDNS app to provide DNS blocking via a VPN layer.

> an Open Source adblocker-style extension that intentionally breaks "do you want to download and install our app..."

While not an extension, the DuckDuckGo browser app on iOS has exactly this feature. Maybe Firefox should consider building it in too!

Sound more like a feature, not like an issue.

The internet must be more than two proprietary app stores.

Is AMP really that bad? It seems to circumvent a lot of paywalls for me and seems to just be a subset of HTML, roughly.

90% of the time I still end up going to the main site instead of reading the AMP article because of the lack of something in the AMP version.

I don’t think Amp is that bad. The issue I described where it breaks iOS native app URL listeners is the only reason I am happy to purchase this extension.

The author of this app made a post on Reddit a few days ago.

https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/pvvi83/googles_amp_p...

The program is opensource.

https://github.com/christianselig/Amplosion

Haha. Not only did this individual hate AMP enough to make this extension, so did Joseph Duffy https://twitter.com/joe_duffy/status/1409146065912225794?s=2..., and so did I https://twitter.com/eric_wvgg/status/1440688602321621000?s=2...

It's source available but not open source. The license part in the repo README explains that.

The author claims its open source but then explicitly omits a license to the repo, so they are misusing the term.

They are not. It’s open sourced, not FOSS

Questionable if it was ever really open source, more like "source available". The author has nor removed the source from the repo.

Most recent public fork I found is now mirrored here: https://github.com/3nprob/Amplosion

> Safari extensions require your permission to run, so in the interest of transparency I wanted to make the app completely open source.

[...]

> License: This is open source in the interest of transparency, and I hope this doesn't need to be said but please don't take this as an opportunity to reupload the code and call it your own. This is the equivalent to the GitHub "No License", so you're more than welcome to inspect the code and audit it, but you do not have permission to repurpose it as your own.

I’d pay a good deal of money to have early 2010 style Google back.

Mainly:

- No AMP

- If I quote a string, you better be goddamn sure it’s present on the pages that you show me.

- One ad per query. These days the organic results are after the page fold. This is unacceptable for something that’s supposed to be a search engine.

—-

The second one gets little attention but it’s infuriating to me. I mean, I’m explicitly telling the engine what I want. If it’s not including it in the results, I might as well not even be here typing. Just show me whatever it thinks I want based on everything it knows about me. And no, unfortunately verbatim doesn’t always help.

By verbatim I assume you mean quoting a string. Example query using that that you consider unsatisfactory?

After you do a search there's a 'tools' button. Clicking it gives you a dropdown with the option to change from 'all results' to 'verbatim'. There's also the 'Advanced Search' https://www.google.com/advanced_search where even if you enter a word in quotes in the 'this exact word or phrase' box you still get results without your query.

I don't have an example query, but it happens all the time. I put a query in quotes and google gives results that neither have the quote in the page blurb on google nor on the destination page.

Having to click around to get a normal search is clearly an anti pattern. Forcing someone to reach for thé mouse rather than simply typing is an insult.

The default search engine can be changed in the browser so that it always invokes Google Search in Verbatim mode. However, there is a side effect that Wikipedia is replaced with strange mirrors in the search results. And some of the desirable fuzzy searching is also lost.

I think you are describing DDG.

DDG, but actually returning search results.

I made DDG my default, and it's great for 95% of my usage. For specific things where I know there should be better results, then I add a !g or !gi to the search query, which redirects to google or google images.

Yeah, I have done the same. DDG is pretty decent! ... and, I totally did not know about the !g/!gi, thanks for that!!

Check out bangs: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

You usually don’t even need to remember them, for most somewhat popular sites you can just guess the bang, and it searches there.

Ah nice, thanks! I feel like I've seen that page before and just totally forgot about it. haha :)

This. Everyone talks up DDG but it is literally one of the crappiest search engine out there. You never get what you want immediately. I think Bing and Searx are better options compared to DDG.

I thought DDG was bing, just with some privacy

Every time I search for something on DDG and there are no/few results, if I do the same query on Google I only get the insane spam/"hacked small business" websites with random SEO that redirect to arbitrary ads.

And of course Google's own promoted results which are usually only vaguely related to the topic (for example if I search something programming-related, I'll get ads for Udemy or whatnot, but not even a specific course)

In my experience, DDG is just as bad as Google at producing results that don't match quotes exactly, and almost effectively just adding random results...

It's like they both just want to add something to the results, instead of saying "can't find anything else".

I happen to use both bing and DDG occasionally and the results are plain bad so I end up using Google anyway.

I should try the opposite though: when Google SERP is useless, try others.

This has been my experience as well. Google, Bing, DDG, they all fail to work well in some major form or another. Google and Bing don't let you do explicit search demands with quotes; all the power tricks for search are gone and I routinely find myself frustrated with trying to find some things-- especially if they fall into the gaps where Google insists on excluding a term.

I would gladly switch to a search engine that just got it all right in the way that Google pre-2010 did.

I’ve been using DDG for a few years now. They are even worse than google at honoring phrase search. In addition, google sometimes even tells you that they ignored some terms. DDG is just silently searching for some crap you never wanted to search for "to help you". It’s by far my #1 annoyance of DDG.

DuckDuckGo essentially ignores negated terms. Try searching for `49ers -football` and you get a front page full of football links and nothing about the gold rush.

This is symptomatic of the fact that the users are not Google's customers. Google search is intended to direct you to the pages which are most profitable to the company. If you happen to find what you're looking for, so be it. If you don't find what you're looking for (because it's obscure and unprofitable) and instead get distracted by something Google would prefer you to see (because it's profitable) then all the better.

The fact that you're a power user puts you in the minority of (likely unprofitable) users anyway, so Google doesn't mind inconveniencing you. They seem to have a pretty fierce anti-power-user culture, as evidenced by all of the (power user/ hacker popular) products and features they've killed over the years.

We've got a lot of work to do if we're ever going to bring back the web we all remember from the old days.

I had a funny one today where I had some weird arguments for a CLI thing I was googling, so I put them in quotes, and Google continued to return results with the "not containing: foo bar | show only results with 'foo bar'" thing under them. Clicking the link just put more quotes into the search string, until my search bar looked like: wixl ''''''foo bar''''''.

I remember when you could put a '+' in front of a keyword and it would be in the results ("+keyword").

Then google+ hijacked that and never gave it back.

Also not applying a political, moral, business-driven, or any other bias in returning results that they want me to see rather than what I want to see. It used to nearly perfectly match my intentions with the request until they got too big and caved to the establishment and money.

A couple of things.

1) People in charge of these features know objectively how pissed off some of their users are. It's done for one simple reason - it brings more advertisement revenue. Google employs some of the smartest people on the planet and they have the demonstrable capacity to build what savvy users like yourself (and me) like.

2) Vast majority of the people are ambivalent and apathetic to these things. The scale at which Google operates is absolutely mind bogglingly massive. Savvy users are the extreme edgecase.

I just don't see any reason to expect a mass-market product or service to serve savvy users. There is a fundamental mismatch in expectation and requirements.

How about image results that are actually images? Now all you get is videos unless you type half a novel's worth of site remover arguments.

>If I quote a string, you better be goddamn sure it’s present on the pages that you show me.

I'd pay significant money for this (20-30 USD/month), plus very few search operators that actually make sense (i.e. and, or, not).

But yeah, we got AI instead ... (pure crap IMO)

I’ve been craving for a “grep for the web” for decades.

Is the quote string to enforce it still usable anywhere? DDG was always even worse than google at this, and I miss being able to search for phrases.

Check out https://neeva.com/

Paid search engine that I switched to last month. Best feature is no ads. You can hook up your private data silos (Notion, Slack, Google, Dropbox etc) and all results appear directly in regular search.

I don’t ever see myself going back to whatever the fuck Google has morphed into over the years.

I'm interested but most search engines give terrible results for Australian searches (increasingly true for Google too, which used to be good at it). How does this one go at not being America-centric?

Update: I'll answer my own question. They didn't even let me sign up.

This all got sacrificed when the mbas and bean counters took charge of GOOG..

I quite like these safari extensions. They almost make up for the forced safari monopoly on iOS (but not really).

I use dark reader on chrome for computers. They also have a safari extension that surprisingly works just as well.

https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader

https://darkreader.org/safari/

I'm concerned, though, whether these extensions work the same as chrome extensions.

Can they view and potentially upload your browser passwords/bank info/etc?

Is there some limitation that prevents this in the implementation?

Firefox had amazing support for mobile plugins. I haven’t checked in a while though.

I assume Apple doesn’t permit this so you’re kinda limited with an iDevice. (he says from his iPhone)

uBlock Origin for Firefox Mobile (Fennec on F-Droid) is a killer feature. I cannot remember the last time I have seen an ad on my phone.

AdGuard (I think?) gets about 80% of them on Safari. But I agree uBlock Origin is amazing. It’s kind of Firefox’s killer feature.

Firefox still supports mobile plugins but, a while ago (IIRC last year), the plugin API changed, as a result currently the selection of available plugins is much smaller than it used to be. I should add that I haven't checked in a few months, maybe it's improved now.

Broad addons support is still locked behind the Nightly version, and you gotta do this weird dance to achieve it

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...

Still the same a year later..

They didn't change the plugin API, they did a massive rewrite of the mobile browser engine infrastructure that broke most of the plugin APIs, and probably the test suites as well. So they are disabled until they can be fixed and proven to work.

In the case of safari you could use the built-in reader mode. I have it enabled by default.

Google of course will never include such a thing

You can accomplish this for free by simply switching your search engine to DuckDuckGo instead of Google.

Google is way better at some classes of searches, still.

For example duckduckgo produce nothing useful when you search Chinese keywords. DDG maybe good at doing English searches but Google obviously have much more resources.

I was wondering when you’d get here!

Agreed. But in those cases where I don't like DDG results, I like how I can add "!g" to the end of my search and it redirects the search to Google.

Doing this on mobile is really not fun, I wish it was a simple click in their results UI

You can do "g!" instead of "!g" on mobile. (And even hn! works, but not every other one.) This helped me considerably

Use whoogle then

https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search

AMP is also used in other places e.g. any external links in Twitter when visited on mobile (IIRC)

I use Google because i) it displays stock price right on the search page. ii) it does match right on the search page.

If DuckDuckGo did smarter results like this, I'd quit Google. Heck I'd even throw in a few bucks.

http://www.startpage.com

Startpage is no good; sold out to an ad company

> I use Google because i) it displays stock price right on the search page.

So does DuckDuckGo; here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/6nCNGZk

> ii) it does match right on the search page.

What do you mean by "match" here?

Google displays a chart with 1d-1m-ytd etc tabs as well.

> match

meant to say math.

I have a new laptop on which I set DDG as default and have been tracking myself resorting to Google 50% of the time due to poor results.

If you still want to use Google, you can request the desktop site too. No amp links.

I don't know how much longer that will continue to work though. Many sites ignore it and show the mobile version anyway.

#1 article on the YC News front page.

#1 most popular "tools" app in the App Store.

Google: Take the hint, please.

no, they don't care, this is how the ampthtml-team reacts to criticism https://twitter.com/enzenhofer/status/1442821842050428933 #blocked

Thank you! If there is one thing where Google went to far its that abomination of bad UX and power abuse called AMP. I was fearing I will never get rid of it on iPhone. Would probably also have paid US$10

So, this happens almost daily: I’ll be reading news in an amp page hosted by Google, which I navigated to via Google news, within Google chrome, and half way through the article the page suddenly breaks and I see “Aw, Snap! Something when wrong while displaying this web page”.

There was a time in my life when I believed working for Google was the highest indication of talent. Now, I marvel at how a $1.6 trillion dollar company can’t even serve a page of text and images without fucking it up.

Genuine question: what is the advantage to the end user by seeing non-AMP versions of webpages?

Just bought it. I think of it as a $3 automated boycott.

I don’t like amp for various reasons (not the purpose of this reply) and I expect Google can calculate an AMP bounce rate — they tend to serve ads on the page anyway.

This app allows me to communicate with Google in a language they value: data.

Well that was the fastest app purchase I ever made. Never been so happy to fork over $3.

I finally upgraded to iOS 15 today just to be able to download this app. That's how much I hate AMP.

There's already the Redirect AMP to HTML extension, I use it for both Firefox & Chrome

- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-amp-to-ht...

The point here is that this can be used on iPhone, so there was not already something there.

... and in typical Apple fashion, it costs money to get it.

Yes, damn developers wanting money for their work!

No, it's not about that, and shame on you for thinking so.

It's the plain fact that if this were a problem on Windows or linux, a free script would be available, but because it's Apple, it's a paid plugin or add-on, as it is with everything you need to customise an apple device.

It's a matter of developer culture, where you develop things for a fun, and to solve a problem. Not to make a quick buck.

What's so bad about AMP? If anything, it makes many news sites more "readable", less junk and distraction. Walled garden? Yes, but so is Apple ecosystem, which is this extension for.

Don’t hijack my URLs without my permission. Full stop.

Google should let me fucking disable it without having to rely on a safari extension, because it makes many websites less usable / more broken in many ways. My mobile speeds are fast enough.

It’s glitchy, takes up screen real estate, it’s hyper sensitive to horizontal swipes and will sometimes load an unrelated pages, and instantly forgets your cookies and logins (absolutely awful for sites like Reddit where I want to stay logged in).

That’s my list anyway.

It stupidly and needlessly reinvents scrolling. By doing so, it completely breaks lots of standard and core browser behaviors, such as:

- can’t tap menu bar to scroll back to the very top of the page

- can’t find anything on the page because it breaks built in search (unless you’re lucky enough to have the string visible on the viewfinder )

- old man argument, I’ll admit, but I want the site I’m visiting to be the domain I’m seeing in the address bar. This is the Web, not some Google sub domain.

- scrolling is janky on older iPhones.

Oh, and messes your cookies so you’re never logged in. You need an extra tap to redirect you to the site you actually pay for. And probably a whole lot more I’m not remembering.

I hate it as much as everyone else, but last time I stripped AMP I got a useless paywalled adridden website so I ended up just sharing the AMP URL

For me, it's just frustrating and breaks some functionality on web pages.

I wouldn't mind if it made things better or at least, not worse.

Man, I just want a t-shirt with the app icon artwork on it...

It took me a second to realize it is not supposed to be an exploding Winamp logo.

$3 is an absolute steal. Shut up and take my money!

Firefox addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/

Is there a sweet extension that completely blocks all pop-ups for a given domain? Certain webpages hide all kinds of ads and when you click UI buttons it triggers an ad-click. I would like to straight block all of them.

Does such a thing exist?

Have you tried any ad blocker extensions to see if they already handle that?

The name reminds me of "DCOMbobulator", another software whose purpose was to turn off something that caused endless trouble and which you never asked for in the first place.

The name of the developer sounded familiar, so I looked him up — turns out he’s the developer of Apollo, likely the best reddit iOS client.

I wonder if Amplosion affects other browsers on iOS too, or does it purely work with Safari? Eg, Chrome or Opera Touch

The developer who made the app is brilliant. Seems like any App he builds becomes a success. Not sure how he does it.

I'd pay for an app that could do the same for Apple News links.

Thank you for doing this!

>Respectfully, I think this fits the colloquial definition of open source that your average person (myself included) views as open source and would recognize, and I'm more than happy with that.

Fuck your "colloquial definition"

I agree with you, but he's right in a way: The original purpose of "open source" was to dilute the free software movement, so even though the OSI doesn't recognize such licenses as "open source", it's no surprise why the "average person[/developer]" sees it that way.

Seriously considering purchasing (I hate AMP with a passion), but what’s the nonsense in the reviews about dogs and games and stuff? I don’t need that kind of distraction.

Assuming this is a web extension, you'll only be living amp-free in safari. (pretty sure iOS doesnt allow hijacking another domain's universal links?)

Correct. Some extensions still offer tools via the share dropdown though. This extension could add a “Open without AMP” option in there.

You could just use https://www.amputatorbot.com in this case. The extension's selling point is convenience

Take my money

Almost worth it

It was on sale for $1.99 yesterday.

$4.49 in Australia

This is an advertisement

If I trusted an app that I expect has to look at every url I ever visit, $3 is a no-brained.

It’s open source. You can even build it yourself it you want to

It’s not open source, it lacks a license entirely. And, therefore, nobody is allowed to build it themselves.

You can sure build it, if you want to. And the source is open, so you can check it out.

But sure, I’ll cave. What would be a better term for this?

Source available?

Nice, thanks! Didn’t know that one.

> You can sure build it, if you want to.

I am physically able, yes, but I am not legally allowed to. Since I am not given any permission (i.e. license) to do that.

> And the source is open, so you can check it out.

The term “open source” is used in two ways: the intelligence community reportedly uses it to refer to information sources which are publicly available, as opposed to secretly gathered information. The other use of the term “open source” is as defined by the OSI, who pioneered this new use.

The usual term for source code which is merely available for reading, and not much, if anything, else, is “source-available”¹.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

> I am physically able, yes

We agree, then :) If they’re anxious regarding the privacy implications of using this extension, they can build it themselves.

> The term …

Alright, I agree, that was a misuse of the definition on my part, and I should have said “Source-available”. I was unaware of this definition, so thanks!

I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way, Apple let you register URLs to redirect to your app, so I'm assuming they've just done this for AMP URLs and strip it back to a proper link and then open that using the system browser (whichever you have set).

No, this is the new Safari extensions API in iOS 15.

The program is open sourced.

https://github.com/christianselig/Amplosion

https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/pvvi83/googles_amp_p...

The author also created a popular app for Reddit called Apollo.

https://apps.apple.com/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575

https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/787rtu/introducing_a...

While it looks great, this app isn’t open-source.

Open-source means that the source code can be freely modified and redistributed. This is explicitly forbidden by the license of Amplosion. The proper term for this kind of licence is “source-available”. The description and the website are misleading and should be updated.

While the extension source is available. The developer deliberately make it non licensed which means it he retains all copyrights and it is not an open source by any useful mean. And he ia quite aggressive about that.

https://github.com/christianselig/Amplosion/issues/1

I find it weird that both you and TechnologyClassroom in that GitHub issue thread brought up copyright. Even if the developer had used an open source license, they would still have retained copyright. You can complain about the license just fine, but copyright is not relevant to that discussion.

The developer in the r/apple subreddit said that it is an open source and a couple of comments here made that claim also. So I was just clarifying. It is more about

And to be clear about that. That's from github docs

"You're under no obligation to choose a license. However, without a license, the default copyright laws apply, meaning that you retain all rights to your source code and no one may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work. If you're creating an open source project, we strongly encourage you to include an open source license" [1]

And in the developer last comment in the issue he closed he quoted that also to explain that it is not allowed to do anything except seeing code for transparency purpose.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-reposi...

This reminds me of Jeremy Clarkson's speeches about race version of street cars: Paying more for less car. Ten thousand dollars more for the same car but without air conditioning. A few thousand more for one without rear seats. Eventually we will we be paying an infinite amount of money for a car that doesn't exist.

Three dollars to disable this OS feature. Another three to not use passwords. A few more for bypassing another feature tomorrow. One day we will be paying for an OS that doesn't actually do anything. But isn't that exactly what happens every time I buy a laptop? I am paying for an OS that I am going to bypass/dump/replace the moment I open the box!

It’s not an OS features. AMP links are a Google product that are incredibly annoying. The OS feature being leveraged here is adding a URL scheme handler that routes those annoying AMP links to their actual destination.

The OS (iOS) and the service you’re paying to modify (Google) are very different, so this analogy doesn’t make any sense.

If Apple charged you to not use ScreenTime or something, sure, but that’s not the case.

What he said doesn’t make sense anyway. More is less.

Plenty of people pay extra to have a slimmed down version of something, ask Apple users.

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