Accelerated Mobile Pages, or 'AMP' for short, is a project Google has been working on for a few years that makes it easier for sites to create faster mobile experiences. You've probably seen most of your favorite sites add support for AMP over the past year or two, and now you can count Android Police (your favorite site, obviously) among them!

So what took us so long, you might ask? Well, we've spent an entire year working on a heavily-customized version of AMP that looks and feels almost exactly like the real site. All the design elements look the same, the comment section works (many sites forget that part!), videos and other embedded content is fully-functional, and everything is generally where you would expect. However, you can still get the speed benefit of AMP, as elements don't load until you scroll down to them. You can see a demo here.

Left: Regular page; Right: AMP Page

If you find yourself on the AMP version of a page, and you want to see the original version, there's a handy link right under the article title. Most sites make it extremely difficult to get back to the original page, and even though our AMP site is basically the same as the mobile site, we threw a link in anyway. Only articles have AMP versions, not the home page, categories, tags, and so on.

The image gallery is one of the best aspects of AMP articles. It's super smooth and responsive, and you can swipe down on it at any time to close the popup.

Some of the work towards AMP has already had a positive effect on the main site. For example, since AMP doesn't allow custom JavaScript, we had to create a new resizing method for images (and video, and other embedded content) that was entirely based in CSS and server-side PHP. We rolled out the new implementation earlier this month on the main site, which got rid of the annoying page-jumping-up-and-down image loading issue on mobile once and for all.

We've also signed up for Google's 'AMP Real URL' program, so visiting the AMP page in Chrome should soon show "androidpolice.com" in the address bar instead of a Google URL (when you visit from Google Feed/News/Search/etc.). The rollout is dependent on some server-side magic, and it should happen sometime in the next few days.

The only bug you might notice is that the full-screen image gallery sometimes skips images during swiping. This is due to an issue with the official AMP gallery, not anything we've done, and Google engineers say it will take a few weeks to fix the bug.

It took a substantial amount of effort to get our AMP pages to be feature-complete with the main site, and I don't think it's a stretch to say it's one of the best implementations on the web today. If you've been waiting for this, be sure to thank our talented development team Artem, Maciej, Sebastiaan, Stephan, and Vlad.

If you find a bug, let us know by filing an issue on GitHub or by sending a tip.