HACKER Q&A
📣 franze

Is AMPhtml Dead or Dying?


hi, i just looked at the amphtml github repo commit stats page

https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/graphs/contributors?from=2015-08-30&to=2023-02-21&type=c

and since mit 2022 there is nearly no activity? Does anybody know, is the AMPhtml team even still at Google?

  👤 mooreds Accepted Answer ✓
This was an interesting podcast episode on AMP in general. Seems like it shipped before it was ready and, though there have been improvements, it is really a dead end for publishers. The guest on the podcast said you'd be better off putting your effort into making sure your pagespeed was better than building out anything around AMP.

https://poweredbycoffee.co.uk/podcasts/scale/bonus-episode-g...

👤 rchaud
AMP has been comatose for a while, and antitrust scrutiny is probably to blame. Google doesn't require publishers to use it for "enhanced visibility" on search results anymore. I know that I haven't seen an AMP link in a long time, but YMMV.

In any case, it never looked good to have a major search engine tell site publishers "just mirror your pages on my servers, and I'll remove all the cruft, except for Google Ads."

👤 CM30
Given that Google dropped most of the need to use AMP in 2021:

https://9to5google.com/2021/04/19/google-search-page-experie...

And other services are either bypassing it or discontinuing it, it's pretty likely that AMPhtml is either dead or dying right now.

👤 thr0wnawaytod4y
I sure hope it's dead, it's bad for privacy and security and benefited no user ever
👤 claudiulodro
Without disclosing too much, I am fairly involved around this topic, and I would say it's definitely heading for deprecation this year. The key giveaway is that Google Analytics 3 will be shutting down in July[0] and AMP has made no progress towards supporting Google Analytics 4[1]. I think it'll be deprecated at first rather than shut down because there are still billions of AMP documents floating around the web.

[0] https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11583528?hl=en

[1] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/24621

👤 mobilio
Probably... also parts of team was moved to other teams, other leave company (Google). I'm not sure who was still in on AMP team.

But main feature of AMP was "Top Stories" in SERP. In 2021 they (Google) make this also for non-AMP sites: https://searchengineland.com/google-top-stories-carousel-now...

Also starting from iOS 15 users can't see AMP on result pages. If iOS was 14 - they can be seen. https://searchengineland.com/amp-links-in-google-search-brea...

But other parts of AMP was going good - AMPAds and AMPEmail.

👤 franze
clickable link: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/graphs/contributors?fr...