I personally don't see any major improvements in speed when using AMP. It might be marginal but too small to notice for a regular user. Another factor can be that AMP might work better on Chrome which is again Google sucking you into their ecosystem.
I get the feeling it's aimed mainly at all the crappy bottom-of-the-barrel Android devices out there.
As an iPhone user, why the hell would I care if a page is bit larger, I pull down over 500Mbit/s on wifi and over 100Mbit/s on LTE. The CPU in iPhone is so fast it's almost ridiculous. There is little difference in how fast AMP pages load compared to real web pages.
Basically, Google re-invented WAP for exactly the same, dumb, reasons the original WAP was invented: their phones are too shit to use the real web.
iPhone is no better...when I was developing a web site, I bought an iPhone 4 as a testing device, and it was quite painful to use compared to my Samsung S7 Edge (and quite slow).
I bought it because it was still used heavily in the user base.
An iPhone 4 is an ancient and no longer supported device, it's 7 years old, an eternity in the mobile market. You're comparing a 2010 device to a 2016 one.
People who have perfectly functional iPhones 4 deserve to use the web too. Forcing people to pay huge premium just to keep the same functionality is messed up
> People who have perfectly functional iPhones 4 deserve to use the web too.
An iPhone 4 isn't perfectly functional. It's an outdated device that is no longer getting security updates and as such should not be used on the open web.
Let me take a guess: you are a regular user, so probably you're in rural China with your 4 year old mobile phone that you got for $100 back then. Or you are in India (30% yearly mobile growth) with your shiny new $30 phone, loading a big web page of a web site in U.S., and you still don't see any difference?
