AMP for email is bad

Maybe one should first ask: Is AMP currently good for anyone but GOOG?

Maybe this is selection bias or just plain old regular curmudgery, but I can't stand amp. I have a modern device and fast internet everywhere I go with my phone. I find amp sites to be consistently slower, uglier and less navigable than the request-desktop version of a site. My phone, and most other low-mid to high end phones have the sreeen real estate and processing power to handle and use desktop versions of a site.

Retaining a familiar interface across devices leads to faster site usage than any speed gains that might be happening because of amp. Measuring the speed of a website in kb/s alone isn't a good enough metric, and the standardisation attempts of amp are ugly imo.

AMP is bad for everything. To be clear, this starts by it not being good for anything. Like on the web the form of AMP used by Google and Cloudflare.

Starting with google: AMP does not actually make loading any faster. Google just uses it's search monopoly to make it seem so. When you use google search with javascript enabled AMP results are both prioritized in the listing and pre-loaded in the background. This makes up the entire increase in load time you perceive. AMP pages not pre-loaded by google are just as slow to load.

At Cloudflare there are other problems. If you're a CF customer and have the option enabled, your AMP page hosted on CF servers will do some nasty stuff. Specifically outgoing links to third party domains will be mirrored onto cloudflare's servers and re-hosted. Presented to anyone clicking off your CF AMP page as the actual site but not. Instead CF gets the hits and you never see it. I've seen the CF bots doing this to my domain. But CF never responds to emails from anyone that isn't a customer.

As for AMP for email I don't know the specific downsides besides the obvious corporate centralization and control this gives. But it certainly doesn't have any purpose. And I say this as a guy that only reads email as text and never renders HTML.

> When you use google search with javascript enabled AMP results are both prioritized in the listing and pre-loaded in the background.

Or Bing search or Baidu search or Yahoo! Japan search and so on. The whole point of AMP is that it can be safely preloaded and prerendered, making it faster than any other web page you can create for people coming from a link aggregator. One of the big advantages it has over Facebook Instant Articles or Apple News is that a publisher has to create an AMP page once and then gets to integrate with the multiple link aggregators that support AMP for free. If I want to create my own link aggregator, I don't need a FAANG's clout to get publishers to integrate with me for instant-loading pages — I can use their existing AMP pages.

> You could do that with regular HTML.

You ignored the safely qualifier. You would deanonymize a user to the publisher and the third party trackers on their page even if the user never clicks through to visit the page.