Google Play Newsstand for Android has been updated today and while it is a small upgrade, it is an important one. The app now supports Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, which will give users amazingly fast page loads within the app. AMP, for those who aren’t familiar, is a new code structure that Google has introduced that allows quick loading of pages from sites that are AMP enabled.
AMP pages are generally offered up to users through Google Search or if an app has been enabled to support AMP and of course the website in question also has to support AMP. For the record, ClintonFitch.com as of last Friday is 100% compatible with all posts and pages rendered in the accelerated pages. While Google will serve these pages up
Google Play Newsstand
themselves, you can try it out here by going to any article (like this one) and adding /amp to the end of the article’s URL. Do this in your browser will give you a view of how the page looks in AMP.
Since Google Play Newsstand is, more or less, a curation app of news and articles in areas of interest you select, the support of AMP pages is an important step and will speed up the rendering of these articles you launch from the app. In testing the app for this post, the articles for AMP enabled sites (which is a vast majority it appears) load almost instantly. It makes for a dramatically faster user experience.
The update is available now in the Google Play Store and if you have the app installed, you should see the OTA update now or very soon. If you haven’t installed it, you can do so here.
