Since its launch in 2015, AMP has grown to power billions of web pages from tens of millions of domains across all industries. With its growth, however, a number of misconceptions and myths surrounding the AMP project have also come about. In fact, many publishers and businesses are skeptical to adopt AMP because of its assumed flaws and limitations.
Today’s article wants to clear up those misconceptions and bust 10 of the most common AMP myths. Read on to learn how you can take advantage of its incredible page delivery speed.
10 AMP myths you need to stop believing
Myth #1: AMP is only for mobile.
Truth: AMP is built with responsive features to work across all devices.
At first launch, AMP stood for “Accelerated Mobile Pages”. Since then, though, the longer title has simply become AMP. That’s because, the framework involves optimizing all web pages to improve user experience, not just mobile.
AMP has expanded over the years to offer various responsive design features to improve web pages across all devices and screen sizes, including desktop and tablet. So rather than being mobile-only, AMP is actually mobile-first — optimized for mobile, but expanded for other device types.
(Note: Some features for third-party platforms (e.g. Google’s Top Stories carousel) may only be designed for the mobile experience, and you should confirm with the third-party platform for how they integrate with AMP.)
Myth #2: AMP is exclusively a Google project.
Truth: AMP is an open source initiative led by Google and other companies and members of the web community.
Although AMP is Google-led, it’s designed as a standalone open source project that invites developers and other members of the community to contribute as core committers, making AMP fully independent.
From day one, AMP was developed with publishers, ad vendors, technology providers, and platforms aside from Google, such as Twitter, Linkedin, and Pinterest. It was also conceived as an open source project of the “GitHub generation” with very open collaboration.
From 2016 to 2019, AMP has received contributions from over 850 contributors — 78% of whom were not employed by Google, including those above along with Yahoo, Bing, and eBay.
While Google does employ a team working full-time on AMP, the team’s weekly meeting notes are published for anyone to view in an attempt to make the project very accessible to outside contributors. AMP even moved to a new governance model that explicitly gives a voice to all constituents of the community, including those who cannot contribute code themselves.
The AMP framework’s overall goal is to make the mobile web work better for all — not just a single platform, one set of publishers, or one group of advertisers. Making the project truly open source enables people to share and contribute their ideas and code for making the mobile web faster and better.