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

“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 inbox Yet the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. That, and more than a little hubris. ... Read full article.