Apple iOS 11: Safari will convert AMP Urls back to full URLs when these are shared.
Apple iOS 11 will be rolling out soon, once the new iPhones are announced. In the new version of iOS, Safari will have a new feature which will convert Google’s AMP URLs back to the full original web URLs when these are shared, copy/pasted. This was first spotted by Federico Viticci, the editor for MacStories, who posted about the same on Twitter, according to a report on The Verge.
For those who don’t know, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are stripped-down, faster webpages from publishers which are designed to be more mobile friendly. When searching for a news item on Google Search on your mobile browser, the first few results you will see are AMP pages, and these typically load faster than other regular mobile web pages. Indianexpress.com is also one of the Indian publishers, which serves content in AMP on Google Search.
With AMP pages, when users are trying to share it anywhere, you can’t share the full original URL and instead the AMP URL is what gets shared. However, as the tweet by Viticci points out it looks like iOS 11 will ensure that users can share the regular URL instead of AMP ones.
Check out the tweet below
AMP pages typically appear with a little lightning symbol next to them with the word AMP also written next to these links. One can consider them the equivalent of Facebook’s Instant Articles, with the idea being that the content and website should load instantly. The AMP project from Google is an open source initiative and is designed to deal with the issue of slow loading of websites, and geared towards markets like India, etc where mobile connectivity speeds are still not the best.
Google’s claim is AMP pages also save mobile data and consume less than 10 times data than a regular mobile page. Google announced the AMP pages in 2015, and it was rolled out more extensively in India in 2016.
