That's not why AMP is needed. It is needed (by google) to extend their dominance of search results into the results themselves. It is not needed by anyone else.

You can easily make pages lighter without AMP, and we shouldn't so easily swallow the reasons given by Google for its introduction.

I'll rephrase what he said.

AMP was only ever needed because so many made their pages so artificiality heavy in the first place and had no incentive to make them lighter.

AMP SEO advantage is a great incentive to make them lighter. The thing is, Google could have pushed their algorithm toward performance more and make it clear on their page too and have the same effect. They just found a way to get more control from it too.

I think the real trouble with AMP is that it really does bring a better experience to users. It's harder to argue against AMP when it has undoubtedly helped with the web bloat problem. Even I find myself semi-subconsciously preferring the results with the little lightning icon because it means I don't have to wait for the page to perform 3-4 tectonic shifts and wait a couple of seconds to read something that could've been text/plain without a lot of loss. Say what you will, but the experience is much better.

AMP was a very calculated move on Google's part. The narrative of "we're only doing it to help our users avoid the bloat" when everyone agrees that bloat is a huge problem works very well.

My experience is the exact opposite of yours. Amp drives me insane. It shows a bastardized version of most pages, it doesn't behave the way I expect. It has this weird swipe side to side thing that makes no sense and gets triggered accidentally. It also breaks scrolling in iOS, causing the header and footer to always show. I've gotten so sick of the terrible AMP browsing experience that I actually have to click the little i in the top corner to navigate to the real page. Which causes more data use, a worse user experience, and more difficult time getting to the content that I want.

> had no incentive to make them lighter

Didn't they? I mean, I figure everybody read the case studies about page load time and user abandonment. My experience is that those who built a leaner mobile version of their desktop site were also mostly the ones that built an AMP version (WP + "I'll just install a plugin and see what happens" left aside), while those that never cared about mobile users still don't.

Does AMP deliver better rankings? I haven't seen that on sites that I'm affiliated with, but that may be niche specific or the improvement wasn't big enough to go from 4 to 3 etc.

> Didn't they? I mean, I figure everybody read the case studies about page load time and user abandonment.

> that never cared about mobile users still don't.

News website still have multiple MB per page and they all got an AMP version which is much more lightweight.

> Does AMP deliver better rankings?

That's a good question. I do know that Google would show news stories with AMP at the top first, but that was part of a different widget. I do remember reading that it helped ranking.

Pages being heavy is just the justification Google used to implement AMP. They should have prioritised search results based on page size (they have the data) instead to reach the same goal.

(AMP isn't even that light - Google preloads pages in its AMP carousel, using bandwidth whether you tap to view them or not)

It's okay to use more data. But it's important to respect users on faster mobile networks who pay by quota. Getting to the top of Google isn't at all difficult if you know how to build a fast website. And that doesn't require AMP at all.

> It's okay to use more data. But it's important to respect users on faster mobile networks who pay by quota.

Aren't those 2 sentences contradictory?

"We have to consider both of these in seeking a balanced middle-ground" is hardly a paradox.