Safari in iOS 11 Turns Google AMP Links Back into Original Web Links When Shared

Thursday August 24, 2017 2:37 AM PDT by Tim Hardwick
Apple has made a subtle tweak to Safari in iOS 11 to ensure the browser automatically strips out Google AMP URLs when a web page is shared or copy-pasted on an iPhone and iPad (via The Verge).

The discovery was made yesterday by MacStories' Federico Viticci when he tried sharing an AMP article viewed in Safari to iMessage and Reading List.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open source publishing format that was made by Google to strip online articles of extraneous page furniture and improve their loading speed. AMP results are built into the company's mobile search engine results (for example, in the carousel in the Google News app).


However, the format has come in for heavy criticism from several developers because of the way it obfuscates the canonical web URL that the content is gleaned from. Most AMP pages remove any URL link to the original publication and often strip out branding along with advertising and internal links, which also cedes control of web page analytics data to Google.

Apple's decision to have iOS 11 serve original links appears to be a willful rejection of Google's publishing format, which differs from Apple News links in that AMP links don't require an installed app in order to function. It's not certain this decision will be reflected in the final version of iOS 11, but we'll know soon enough – the public release of Apple's new mobile OS is due sometime next month.

28 comments


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dschulian
27 months ago
AMP is the worst web technology introduced by Google. Seriously. Total crap that nobody needs except for Google and their "don't-leave-the-searchengine-we-have-so-much-more-ads-to-show-you" crap.
Rating: 35 Votes
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Phil A.
27 months ago

AMP is the worst web technology introduced by Google. Seriously. Total crap that nobody needs except for Google and their "don't-leave-the-searchengine-we-have-so-much-more-ads-to-show-you" crap.


I couldn't agree more! AMP is a plague on the internet and should be killed off with extreme prejudice
Rating: 22 Votes
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darkarn
27 months ago
Did Apple just... AMPlify their war with Google?
Rating: 7 Votes
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Jynto
27 months ago
Google AMP is utter garbage. It interferes with Safari in more ways than one. Normally the URL bar gets smaller as you scroll down a page, but that never happens with AMP pages. On my old 4S, some pages wouldn't even scroll at all. I had to manually scrub the URLs. But hey, at least they load 1.524623 seconds faster. Thanks, Google!
Rating: 6 Votes
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dannyyankou
27 months ago
Amp is awful, you can’t even do something as simple as “find in page”
Rating: 4 Votes
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johannnn
27 months ago
Love this news!
Rating: 4 Votes
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legacyb4
27 months ago
Wish it would strip AMP completely; hate that tap on the status bar doesn't bring you back to the top of the article on an AMP site.
Rating: 3 Votes
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cfurlin
27 months ago

I guess you could always change your default search engine to Bing or Duckduckgo and leave the google universe behind.


Done and done.
Rating: 3 Votes
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AppleFan91
27 months ago
Good. I wish there was a way to disable or block AMP from being used. I will purposely try to go to a website manually rather than selecting the amp search result. It’s a tad bit quicker but I can’t use “find in page”, the back button breaks all the time, usually can’t tap at the top of the screen to scroll to the top and if the website has a comment section, it rarely loads. I wish Google would allow us to log into our Google accounts and disable amp.
Rating: 1 Votes
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dannyyankou
27 months ago

Want your cake and eat it too?

Use Google without AMP results by using HTTPS://encrypted.google.com/search?q= as your search engine.

Et voilà - no more AMP!

Using Bing as your default works too
Rating: 1 Votes
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