Last month, Google announced a new open-source project called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) that will enable articles from news publications to load almost instantly on smartphones and tablets. AMP has been in a technical preview since the announcement, but Google now says it will debut Accelerated Mobile Pages early next year.
The company states that in the six weeks since it revealed AMP, more than 4500 developers have begun following the project on Github, and it has received around 250 code contributions.
In a updated blog post regarding the project, Google says thousands of companies have expressed an interest in having their pages optimized, including the BBC, Sankei, New York Times, News Corp, Washington Post and more. They would join the likes of CBS Interactive, International Business Times/Newsweek, Thrillist, Slate, and many others who have already committed their support to the project.
The post goes on to say that ad networks Outbrain, AOL, OpenX, DoubleClick, and AdSense "are working within the [AMP] framework to improve the advertising experience for users, publishers and advertisers on the mobile web."
By caching web pages ahead of time on the company's high-end servers, AMP will drastically speed up article loading times on mobile devices. It also makes mobile browsing a faster experience by not loading an image or video until a user scrolls down to it, allowing the top part of a page to load much quicker.
Both Facebook's Instant Articles and Apple News provide a similar service to AMP, offering a way for publishers to load their articles faster and, hopefully, keep readers sticking around longer.
If you're using a mobile device and want to try out an AMP page, click this link then search for a news item.