It's true that Google doesn't explicitly boost AMP pages. But it does boost all of the attributes that AMP enforces on a page (reduced page size, loading speed, etc). So it's an implicit signal boost rather than explicit. You may think that that's fine and there's nothing wrong with that, but no doubt Google see this as a way keeping users within the Google system as much as possible while they browse.
I'm personally on the fence regarding the whole situation. On one hand, I like less bloat, on the other I don't want a 3rd party involved more than is required in delivering a news article to me.
"It's true that Google doesn't explicitly boost AMP pages. But it does boost all of the attributes that AMP enforces on a page (reduced page size, loading speed, etc)."
So Google is guilty of making things that users want?
"Google see this as a way keeping users within the Google system as much as possible while they browse."
Well, isn't giving users what they want a way to keep them inside your system?
I don't see the point in your comment, are you saying that Google should not be optimizing for what users want?
Indian users are the worst example for this, given the regular 2G connections. Hundreds of KB of JS is not helping this, especially not on low-end mobile devices.
No, they are not, that's a misconception. Many low end devices simply lack the capacity to efficiently cache this many things, so they are going to re-download it once it's purged.
Many low end devices simply lack the capacity to efficiently cache this many things
Very low-end devices still have an outrageous amount of memory and storage compared to the scopes we're talking about. In the actual anecdotes of people in India expressing their good user experience with AMP, actual results seem to differ.
But as a North American with a GS8 and a very fast LTE connection, I still love getting AMP results. Just confining to best practices is alone worth it.
> But they might have seen the icon, and realized it means "it loads fast!", and they want it.
Imagine your country's water sources are filthy and crappy. Your tap water literally stinks - all of that because of unrestricted commercial development. Now imagine that to solve this problem, your government created a certificate mark (Aqua Model Premium, complete with a cool icon), which can be issued to bottle water companies who meet a set of water quality criteria.
People want clean drinking water, they might have seen the AMP icon, so they'll go and buy the water bottles from government-certified companies, right?
(Oh, and let's not forget the criteria are written in such way that the bottle companies can literally shit in the bottle, as long as they use government-certified shit dispensers for that.)
Or how about the government starts issuing penalties to water delivery companies and to those who pollute rivers, until the tap water again meets the AMP criteria?
It's not a perfect analogy (Google is not a government, but it kind of owns most of the web as we know it), but it's more-less how I see this situation. Google already penalizes some bloat; they could push this much further (especially for mobile searches) instead of creating a new pseudo-standard.
The point being, as a solution for bloat, AMP is at best a workaround. But as this article proves, it's not even an effective workaround - AMP pages are free to include all the usual resource-heavy crap, just through a new set of "AMP-optimized" JS libraries.
I'm personally on the fence regarding the whole situation. On one hand, I like less bloat, on the other I don't want a 3rd party involved more than is required in delivering a news article to me.