Founded by Google in February of last year, the AMP Project has often been compared to Facebook’s Instant Articles. Instant Articles changed the way content was delivered, giving publishers the chance to embed their content across Facebook, and deliver it in a faster and easier way. The AMP project is a similar idea, but open source and designed to live outside the walled gardens like Facebook.

Why Google likes AMPs

User Experience

In today's mobile-first environment, content creators know that users expect quality experiences on any device. By reducing load times and standardising page elements, AMPs go some way towards guaranteeing this. Unsurprisingly then, it’s in Google’s interest to offer mobile users the best possible end-to-end experiences - by doing this, they keep people coming back. By giving precedence to AMPs, they are simply doubling down on this. With more people using mobile devices as their primary search tools, desktop usage for browsing has steadily decreased.

Advertising

When browsing the web on a smartphone, pop-ups can affect your experience when consuming content. With AMPs, adverts will be standardised and integrated into the page, prioritising the content and never sacrificing the speed or UX of the overall page. This offers advertisers a chance for their ads to be viewed by consumers instead of them abandoning them due to slow load times. By standardising advertising on AMPs, Google gives publishers a mechanism for creating ad-revenues through AMP content, ensuring they're not worse off than they would've been serving content via apps.

Adapting your site to AMP

So now’s the important part, how do you actually create AMPs? Google is providing comprehensive documentation for the AMP standard, including a tutorial providing a step-by-step guide on how to create your first AMP page.

Is my app doomed?

When the first apps for iOS and Android launched, the world went into a frenzy. They were new and sought after, as the mobile web offered very limited experiences at the time. Consumers are heavily reliant on mobile applications, with the average user spending 2 hours a day on apps in 2016. As time went by, significant improvements to mobile web infrastructure, and a keen focus on mobile CX by marketers made browser experiences much more compelling. Whilst apps do offer some advantages (everything from push notifications, to a more controlled environment), getting customers to install and actually keep using mobile apps is no mean feat.

If app publishers can deliver high-quality experiences without having to clear this hurdle, that might begin to seem like an attractive option. Couple this with the fact that apps require budget and resources to develop and run, especially across different platforms such as iOS, Windows, Android and more - publishers might have a real incentive to get behind AMPs and other mobile technology.

Companies including the Guardian and the Washington Post have got on board with the project meaning people are now able to access news via AMPs rather than through apps. Google estimated in September 2016 that there were currently, over 600 million AMP documents accessible on the web covering various industries. With AMPs being relatively new, they will continue to develop and be at the forefront of mobile content.

So if your app downloads are suffering, that might not be such a bad thing - AMPs could even make your life easier! Of course, there is still a place for mobile apps, particularly where content is non-static, such as mapping, messaging, some types of gaming and more, but for news, blogs, even product listings and more, Accelerated Mobile Pages might well be the way of the future.