Twitter’s mobile apps won’t open links in AMP anymore

Twitter dropped support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on mobile, according to a support page from the company.

Spotted by SEO consultant Christian Oliveira (via The Verge), the support page originally explained how Twitter would automatically send mobile users to the AMP version of a webpage through links posted on the platform. The page was updated at some point between October 21st and now with a notice that the company will retire the feature by the end of the year.

However, The Verge cites data from SearchEngineLand that shows Twitter’s AMP retirement likely wrapped up earlier this month. Now, visiting a webpage from Twitter on mobile appears to send users to the regular webpage instead of the AMP version.

For those unfamiliar with AMP, it’s a somewhat controversial technology introduced by Google back in 2015. Google’s goal with AMP was to make the mobile web faster. However, many people disliked AMP because of Google’s perceived control of the project and claimed it was an attempt by the search giant to further control the open web.

For example, there was a time when Google required news sites to offer AMP versions of their sites if they wanted to feature in the search engine’s ‘Top Stories’ section. However, Google dropped that requirement in May 2020.

People also had issues with how AMP worked, such as how AMP operated on Google’s servers rather than on the actual website people wanted to go to, or how AMP sites wouldn’t respect some settings like a users’ log-in status. In other cases, developers would make AMP versions of their site but would cut features and/or functionality, making the AMP variant significantly worse than the regular site.

Twitter’s support document doesn’t list a reason for the policy change, but for some users, it will likely be a welcome one. AMP is a regular pain in my ass since I mostly use Twitter as a news aggregation platform, so I’m happy about the change. And anyone who uses any of the plethora of browser extensions or apps designed to redirect AMP pages to the original URL will also likely welcome Twitter’s new policy.

Source: Twitter, Christian Oliveira, SearchEngineLand Via: The Verge