Interesting to see how different companies address the "mobile web sucks" problem.
Google is coming from the top, pushing for "the right way to do mobile web" for the entire Internet, while Facebook is building its own walled garden of Instant Articles. Both of these strategies require the content provider to adopt yet another "standard", which takes time and money to make happen. IMOH, any of these tech company driven "push-for-a-certain-tech" is less likely to work, or at least not cost effective.
In contrast, the transition to "mobile web first" is already done in China, which I would argue has the largest monetizable mobile consumer market in the world (because it's not only for hip young people. Most if not all of the grandma generation in China are getting on the internet for the 1st time, and only through WeChat on smartphones). Any user of the WeChat app knows the astonishing volume of contents shared within that social app, and all of them are mobile centric, actually it's fair to say it's "mobile only" (if you load the same URL of a shared article in WeChat on a desktop browser it'll look aweful i.e. they are not responsive, and they don't care). Yet, this transition happened not because of WeChat pushed all content providers to adopt a certain standard, but done spontaneously by each content provider, on their own to figure out what looks good on WeChat. The need to make "mobile only" content comes from the desire to reach the huge user base in WeChat, which, unlike facebook, is a "mobile only" app.
The tech for making mobile friendly webpages are there for years. I would argue the reason it's not happening in the US is because of weak demand, not supply. If you have the sort of "mobile only" demand as seen in WeChat (Facebook is better positioned in that regard than Google), you'd see content providers switch to whatever suits them overnight.
I don't mean to defend Facebook but Instant Articles is based on RSS... hardly a walled gardern. On the other end, AMP is (yet another) re-invention of the wheel from Google.
Technologically it's not a walled garden, but "business wise" - for lack of a better word- it is definitely a way to improve content consumption experience on Facebook, not for the general Internet at large.
But it's not, really. It's HTML + a mandatory web components polyfill and standard library loaded from a remote origin. If I just rendered the HTML, I wouldn't see any images or videos, because they're hidden behind custom <amp-img> and <amp-video> tags.
I guess the upside is that I also wouldn't see content in the <amp-ad> or <amp-pixel> elements.
I wouldn't disagree with AMP being "just web technologies," but it's sure as hell not "just HTML."
In contrast, the transition to "mobile web first" is already done in China, which I would argue has the largest monetizable mobile consumer market in the world (because it's not only for hip young people. Most if not all of the grandma generation in China are getting on the internet for the 1st time, and only through WeChat on smartphones). Any user of the WeChat app knows the astonishing volume of contents shared within that social app, and all of them are mobile centric, actually it's fair to say it's "mobile only" (if you load the same URL of a shared article in WeChat on a desktop browser it'll look aweful i.e. they are not responsive, and they don't care). Yet, this transition happened not because of WeChat pushed all content providers to adopt a certain standard, but done spontaneously by each content provider, on their own to figure out what looks good on WeChat. The need to make "mobile only" content comes from the desire to reach the huge user base in WeChat, which, unlike facebook, is a "mobile only" app.
The tech for making mobile friendly webpages are there for years. I would argue the reason it's not happening in the US is because of weak demand, not supply. If you have the sort of "mobile only" demand as seen in WeChat (Facebook is better positioned in that regard than Google), you'd see content providers switch to whatever suits them overnight.