AMP and why emails are not (and should never be) interactive

Summary

“Email has largely stayed the same,” wrote Gmail product manager Aakash Shaney in 2019, while the web rapidly evolved around it.No more. Google’s AMP for email meant “your emails can stay up to date” and “you can easily take action directly from the message itself.”Four years earlier, the search giant had come for the mobile web with AMP—accreted mobile pages. Devs would code mobile versions of their site using AMP libraries, host them in Google’s CDN, and reap the benefits of near-instant load times and preferential placement in Google search results.And now they were coming for your emails, dangling the benefits of a modernized messaging experience where you could book flights and hotels, respond to meeting invites and Google Docs comments, all from the comfort of your inbox.“Who would ever want this?” asked @waste_monk on Hacker News. “We are living in hell.”Dante's inboxYet the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. That, and more than a little hubris.On the web, AMP had gained grudging adoption through carrots and sticks. Build an AMP site, and you’d get preferential placement in search results, a grey lightning bolt near your site’s name in search results, and a near-zero latency page load from Google’s CDN—all carrots. “We are here to make the web great again,” said Google’s vice president of news, Richard Gingras in 2015, only months after Donald Trump brought that phrase into the vernacular. Google assumed publishers the world over would happily rewrite their mobile sites to the search giant’s whims.The implicit stick, though, was that without an AMP page, your site wouldn’t rank as highly as it may have previously. And with over 89% of global search volume, when Google asks web publishers to jump, they say how high.There were always issues with AMP. It brought back the dynamics of the mobile versus the desktop web, for one. Instead of the same web for everyone, you now had one page on mobile, another page on desktop—exactly what responsiv...