Last Updated on 22/11/2021 by TheDigitalHacker
According to a support page noticed by SEO consultant Christian Oliveira, Twitter has silently withdrawn support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on mobile. The support page initially described how Twitter’s mobile applications would automatically redirect users to the AMP version of a website when they clicked on links posted on the social network. However, sometime after October 21st, Twitter updated the page with a note stating that the functionality will be retired before the end of the year.
As per SearchEngineLand statistics, this procedure appears to have been finished early this month. Attempting to access a website via Twitter now appears to redirect visitors directly to the traditional web page, rather than any available AMP version.
Although Twitter claims that AMP enables “fast-loading, attractive, high-performing mobile web experiences,” the technology has been contentious since its introduction by Google in 2015. Much of the debate centred on Google’s perceived management of the initiative, with some detractors arguing that it amounted to Google’s attempt to reinforce its control over the open web.
However, it also has more fundamental user interface issues for a network like Twitter due to the way it may tamper with URLs, making pages appear to be from Google regardless of the website that published them. It’s an inconvenient circumstance that has prompted the development of browser extensions that automatically redirect AMP sites to the original content URL in order to prevent misunderstanding.
Twitter’s support document does not provide an explanation for the policy change. A spokeswoman did not reply to a request for comment right away.
The social network’s action follows Google’s announcement in May 2020 that it would no longer need news publishers to provide AMP versions of their websites in order to be displayed in its search engine’s Top Stories section. Following a Google project established in May 2018 to take what the firm had learnt from AMP and incorporate its features into universal web standards, the move was long overdue.
For more more on AMP, listen to this 2018 edition of The Vergecast, which has an interview with AMP’s former tech lead Malte Ubl.
