That’s not my experience at all, at least on iOS. I notice essentially no performance improvement when accessing AMP vs when I inevitably choose to load the non-AMP site because AMP sucks terribly.

So which is your experience? I'm quite curious.

Is it that AMP sites also take 5-7 seconds to load?

Or that native sites load instantaneously?

There’s a really easy answer here: you’re all talking past each other.

AMP isn’t just a standard for “fast webpages”. It’s also a technique google uses to embed other pages in their search results, such that:

- Google rehosts the result on google.com (with the same HTTP2 connection you already have open to their server)

- Sites are eagerly loaded in the background even if you don’t click them (making them appear instantaneous)

There’s a difference between “I was sent a link to a site that uses AMP and I opened it” (which may be slow) and “I came across a site while searching on google” (which is nearly always fast.)

AMP-the-standard gives google the guarantees necessary to enable hosting your site inside the google search results. This is why it’s perceived as fast. If you’re connecting to the original site itself, outside the context of a google search (or some equivalent... I know Facebook does similar re-hosting) you’re not going to see as much of a speed gain.

(Side note: if AMP-the-standard was all that it was and the speed gains only came from having less bloated JS and requiring all on-screen elements to have known sizes to prevent pop-in, I’d love it. It’s what google does to it in its search results that I hate.)

My typical experience with AMP on an iPhone SE2 running iOS 14 has been that it either takes 10+ seconds to load or simply never does. I am not using any sort of ad blocker.

This obviously isn't the typical experience with AMP, but they clearly have something broken somewhere.

When the page fails to load the AMP related javascript, you're left with a 8s delay coming from this inline CSS:

    animation:-amp-start 8s steps(1,end) 0s 1 normal both}
    @keyframes -amp-start{from{visibility:hidden}to{visibility:visible}}

Do you have JavaScript turned off? Or any kind of blocker on your router? Any kind of content filter? Some kind of custom DNS?

Because that is absolutely not a normal experience. My SE2 on iOS 14 loads AMP instantly.

I don't know of any evidence that AMP is broken or shoddily coded in a way that affects a significant proportion of users... it's far more likely you've got something actively interfering.

I am using iOS.