I know that AMP is an intensely controversial topic, but I have to provide a counterpoint here because I don't think the web developer community fully appreciates the real state of the web on mobile:
> How many of you think that the amount of time spent on the mobile web as a fraction of total time on device has increased in the last five years? ... it's well below 7% and in a lot of markets it's falling. We have pretty good telemetry inside of Google and what it tells us is that the web is not essential to the future of computing on mobile.
The gist of his argument is that history suggests that when computing platforms drop below 13% of usage (or perhaps it was 10%, I don't remember the specific number), the platform is in a death spiral.
In my 5 years in Web DevRel at Google, I've never heard "it makes the web easier to index" as the main motivation for AMP, I've actually never heard it as a motivation at all. Maybe it is a motivator. The argument definitely makes sense. But I've not heard indexing as a motivator, not even in passing.
As a Googler involved in the web I know that I'm inherently biased and everything I say is likely to be written off, but I'm being 100% transparent with you here. There's a lot of people that care about the open web within Google and see it as the best platform for a lot of the same ideological reasons that you all probably love the web. The open web enthusiasts consider the real competition to be: the web versus whatever other platforms are dominant on the computing devices of the future (right now, that's iOS and Android on mobile devices). AMP is a strategy to incentivize websites to provide user experiences on par with whatever else is out there.
Disclosures: Googler in the "Web DevRel" team. FWIW we don't report to AMP. So my understanding of AMP may not actually align with the AMP team's. Note that I'm not even saying here whether I think AMP is the right approach to tackle the web's big problem, but I do understand why some people felt AMP is necessary right now. This post is definitely my own personal opinion and doesn't even represent Web DevRel's opinion. I may in fact get in trouble for speaking out about this ;)
> How many of you think that the amount of time spent on the mobile web as a fraction of total time on device has increased in the last five years? ... it's well below 7% and in a lot of markets it's falling. We have pretty good telemetry inside of Google and what it tells us is that the web is not essential to the future of computing on mobile.
The Mobile Web: MIA, Alex Russell, https://vimeo.com/364402896#t=13m00s
The gist of his argument is that history suggests that when computing platforms drop below 13% of usage (or perhaps it was 10%, I don't remember the specific number), the platform is in a death spiral.
In my 5 years in Web DevRel at Google, I've never heard "it makes the web easier to index" as the main motivation for AMP, I've actually never heard it as a motivation at all. Maybe it is a motivator. The argument definitely makes sense. But I've not heard indexing as a motivator, not even in passing.
As a Googler involved in the web I know that I'm inherently biased and everything I say is likely to be written off, but I'm being 100% transparent with you here. There's a lot of people that care about the open web within Google and see it as the best platform for a lot of the same ideological reasons that you all probably love the web. The open web enthusiasts consider the real competition to be: the web versus whatever other platforms are dominant on the computing devices of the future (right now, that's iOS and Android on mobile devices). AMP is a strategy to incentivize websites to provide user experiences on par with whatever else is out there.
Disclosures: Googler in the "Web DevRel" team. FWIW we don't report to AMP. So my understanding of AMP may not actually align with the AMP team's. Note that I'm not even saying here whether I think AMP is the right approach to tackle the web's big problem, but I do understand why some people felt AMP is necessary right now. This post is definitely my own personal opinion and doesn't even represent Web DevRel's opinion. I may in fact get in trouble for speaking out about this ;)