Being forced to instead load some (almost universally awful) publisher site w/ 72 MB of JavaScript & CSS, absurdly intrusive ads popping up as you try to read, etc.... is an improved experience?

You don't see anything wrong with Google MITM everybody who uses their phone? It's terrible for the open web. The tradeoff is users loading the real pages that _may_ be heavy, but it's worth it.

At least it doesn't break all the standard navigation gestures.

In iOS 11 you're able to default certain domains to always open in reader mode so you don't even need to download all that crap.

So you think this very website you’re using right now – HN – could be improved by AMP?

I doubt that.

The only pages that get improved by AMP are those that abuse AMP then again anyway.

HN itself? Nope. Many publisher sites do benefit however. Especially local news sites that likely can't attract the best tech talent and/or contract out pages to be shoveled out by contractors.

Re: Abuse of AMP. AMP places sane restrictions on pages https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec#html-tags including hard limits on CSS size, etc... Google enforces these restrictions for pages served through their servers.

This is a much much needed effort to take the publishers toys away given they've proven they cannot be trusted with the full feature set of the web without adult supervision.

> Especially local news sites

You mean TV channels? The ones that all look the same? The ones run by Sinclair broadcasting which will soon be able to control 76% of them?

There seem to be very few true local companies left, the ones around pretend to be local when in fact they're identical to every other one owned by their national parent company.

And that company can afford to do it right. They're rich. They don't need Google to do it for them

> And that company can afford to do it right. They're rich.

In that case not sure what their excuse is but my point still holds true: Their sites are almost universally godawful and they're demonstrably not able to be trusted with the full feature set of the web. AMP provides some sanity including things like hard limits on the size of CSS.

They aren't. They may get the AMP site on non-Google.

I mean, it's not like Apple is totally un-money-motivated here. It's pretty clear that they expect users to buy a new phone every 2 years.

I think you have it backwards. Users want to buy a new phone every 2 years. A 5s still works fine, but most people don't want a 5s.

I was referring to the fact that ios updates significantly slow down phones that aren't front-line, and I would argue that the reason users want a new phone is that + extensive marketing by apple.