‎Amplosion: Redirect AMP Links on the App Store

https://apps.apple.com/br/app/amplosion-redirect-amp-links/id1585734696?l=en

by tambourine_man • 5 years ago

351 151 5 years ago

apps.apple.com

rdtwo• 5 years ago

Almost worth it

covercash• 5 years ago

It was on sale for $1.99 yesterday.

RKearney• 5 years ago

You can accomplish this for free by simply switching your search engine to DuckDuckGo instead of Google.

_tom_2• 5 years ago

Google is way better at some classes of searches, still.

michaellee8• 5 years ago

For example duckduckgo produce nothing useful when you search Chinese keywords. DDG maybe good at doing English searches but Google obviously have much more resources.

yepthatsreality• 5 years ago

I was wondering when you’d get here!

nofinator• 5 years ago

Agreed. But in those cases where I don't like DDG results, I like how I can add "!g" to the end of my search and it redirects the search to Google.

schleck82• 5 years ago

Use whoogle then

https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search

mastazi2• 5 years ago

AMP is also used in other places e.g. any external links in Twitter when visited on mobile (IIRC)

nabaraz2• 5 years ago

I use Google because i) it displays stock price right on the search page. ii) it does match right on the search page.

If DuckDuckGo did smarter results like this, I'd quit Google. Heck I'd even throw in a few bucks.

rscoots• 5 years ago

http://www.startpage.com

JoshTriplett4• 5 years ago

I use Google because i) it displays stock price right on the search page.

So does DuckDuckGo; here's a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/6nCNGZk

ii) it does match right on the search page.

What do you mean by "match" here?

NoblePublius• 5 years ago

I have a new laptop on which I set DDG as default and have been tracking myself resorting to Google 50% of the time due to poor results.

wayneftw• 5 years ago

If you still want to use Google, you can request the desktop site too. No amp links.

I don't know how much longer that will continue to work though. Many sites ignore it and show the mobile version anyway.

_tom_2• 5 years ago

If I trusted an app that I expect has to look at every url I ever visit, $3 is a no-brained.

simonklitj4• 5 years ago

It’s open source. You can even build it yourself it you want to

teddyh2• 5 years ago

It’s not open source, it lacks a license entirely. And, therefore, nobody is allowed to build it themselves.

JazzXP• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way, Apple let you register URLs to redirect to your app, so I'm assuming they've just done this for AMP URLs and strip it back to a proper link and then open that using the system browser (whichever you have set).

ComputerGuru• 5 years ago

No, this is the new Safari extensions API in iOS 15.

KindOne2• 5 years ago

The program is open sourced.

https://github.com/christianselig/Amplosion

https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/pvvi83/googles_amp_p...

The author also created a popular app for Reddit called Apollo.

https://apps.apple.com/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575

https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/787rtu/introducing_a...

throwaway13337• 5 years ago

I quite like these safari extensions. They almost make up for the forced safari monopoly on iOS (but not really).

I use dark reader on chrome for computers. They also have a safari extension that surprisingly works just as well.

https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader

https://darkreader.org/safari/

I'm concerned, though, whether these extensions work the same as chrome extensions.

Can they view and potentially upload your browser passwords/bank info/etc?

Is there some limitation that prevents this in the implementation?

Waterluvian2• 5 years ago

Firefox had amazing support for mobile plugins. I haven’t checked in a while though.

I assume Apple doesn’t permit this so you’re kinda limited with an iDevice. (he says from his iPhone)

zaik• 5 years ago

uBlock Origin for Firefox Mobile (Fennec on F-Droid) is a killer feature. I cannot remember the last time I have seen an ad on my phone.

mastazi2• 5 years ago

Firefox still supports mobile plugins but, a while ago (IIRC last year), the plugin API changed, as a result currently the selection of available plugins is much smaller than it used to be. I should add that I haven't checked in a few months, maybe it's improved now.

gumby3• 5 years ago

In the case of safari you could use the built-in reader mode. I have it enabled by default.

Google of course will never include such a thing

CyberDildonics• 5 years ago

This is an advertisement

forrestthewoods• 5 years ago

Is there a sweet extension that completely blocks all pop-ups for a given domain? Certain webpages hide all kinds of ads and when you click UI buttons it triggers an ad-click. I would like to straight block all of them.

Does such a thing exist?

tones4112• 5 years ago

Have you tried any ad blocker extensions to see if they already handle that?

dhsysusbsjsi• 5 years ago

$4.49 in Australia

arcticbull• 5 years ago

$3 is an absolute steal. Shut up and take my money!

InvaderFizz• 5 years ago

Well that was the fastest app purchase I ever made. Never been so happy to fork over $3.

neil_s• 5 years ago

Genuine question: what is the advantage to the end user by seeing non-AMP versions of webpages?

mathgorges• 5 years ago

Just bought it. I think of it as a $3 automated boycott.

I don’t like amp for various reasons (not the purpose of this reply) and I expect Google can calculate an AMP bounce rate — they tend to serve ads on the page anyway.

This app allows me to communicate with Google in a language they value: data.

KindOne2• 5 years ago

The author of this app made a post on Reddit a few days ago.

https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/pvvi83/googles_amp_p...

The program is opensource.

https://github.com/christianselig/Amplosion

Eric_WVGG• 5 years ago

Haha. Not only did this individual hate AMP enough to make this extension, so did Joseph Duffy https://twitter.com/joe_duffy/status/1409146065912225794?s=2..., and so did I https://twitter.com/eric_wvgg/status/1440688602321621000?s=2...

NmAmDa3• 5 years ago

It's source available but not open source. The license part in the repo README explains that.

pnt12• 5 years ago

The author claims its open source but then explicitly omits a license to the repo, so they are misusing the term.

3np• 5 years ago

Questionable if it was ever really open source, more like "source available". The author has nor removed the source from the repo.

Most recent public fork I found is now mirrored here: https://github.com/3nprob/Amplosion

Safari extensions require your permission to run, so in the interest of transparency I wanted to make the app completely open source.

[...]

License: This is open source in the interest of transparency, and I hope this doesn't need to be said but please don't take this as an opportunity to reupload the code and call it your own. This is the equivalent to the GitHub "No License", so you're more than welcome to inspect the code and audit it, but you do not have permission to repurpose it as your own.

jeffrogers• 5 years ago

Man, I just want a t-shirt with the app icon artwork on it...

smnrchrds• 5 years ago

It took me a second to realize it is not supposed to be an exploding Winamp logo.

sandworm101• 5 years ago

This reminds me of Jeremy Clarkson's speeches about race version of street cars: Paying more for less car. Ten thousand dollars more for the same car but without air conditioning. A few thousand more for one without rear seats. Eventually we will we be paying an infinite amount of money for a car that doesn't exist.

Three dollars to disable this OS feature. Another three to not use passwords. A few more for bypassing another feature tomorrow. One day we will be paying for an OS that doesn't actually do anything. But isn't that exactly what happens every time I buy a laptop? I am paying for an OS that I am going to bypass/dump/replace the moment I open the box!

koolba• 5 years ago

It’s not an OS features. AMP links are a Google product that are incredibly annoying. The OS feature being leveraged here is adding a URL scheme handler that routes those annoying AMP links to their actual destination.

aikinai• 5 years ago

The OS (iOS) and the service you’re paying to modify (Google) are very different, so this analogy doesn’t make any sense.

If Apple charged you to not use ScreenTime or something, sure, but that’s not the case.

cunthorpe• 5 years ago

What he said doesn’t make sense anyway. More is less.

Plenty of people pay extra to have a slimmed down version of something, ask Apple users.

tshaddox3• 5 years ago

The best thing about this is that AMP links totally break “open this page in the website’s native app” links, which I encounter frequently, presumably because the browser is on an AMP proxy domain and thus the iOS native app URL listener doesn’t work. It’s absolutely shocking that such a core flow is completely broken by default when you’re coming from Google search results.

This app fixes this problem!

JoshTriplett4• 5 years ago

I would happily pay for an Open Source adblocker-style extension that intentionally breaks "do you want to download and install our app instead of using a perfectly reasonable web browser that you're in control of" pop-ups. If I don't already have the app installed, there's a reason for that.

(In general, an adblocker is one of the most valuable things I have installed. I wish EasyList had a subscription option; I'd happily pay to help support its maintenance.)

rosstex• 5 years ago

Not always the case. Sometimes I'm looking for something and come across a link to a reddit thread. I'd like to jump to the app easily. What I don't like, however, is how hard websites try to block you from accessing their website without opening the app first.

_jal• 5 years ago

I just don't look at Reddit on mobile.

tshaddox3• 5 years ago

Fair enough. I wish you had that option as well. But when I already have and use the apps, it’s pretty awful for Google to break links that certainly should open in those apps.

IgorPartola• 5 years ago

I block ads at the DNS level. Aside from 2-3 legitimate websites that broke as a result of this (because they use some Salesforce thing as a part of their site or similar), almost every unsubscribe link I get is now broken. I really wish there was some plug-in that would unroll those links to their final form since that’s usually fine but passes through 2-3 bukkshit redirects before it gets there.

buro92• 5 years ago

If I don't already have the app installed, there's a reason for that.

For about 5 years now I've been actively going back to web pages for things.

Example: I no longer have the BBC News app installed. Instead I have a bookmark on my mobile home screen that goes to the BBC News web page.

What I've found is:

1. Most apps didn't need to be apps, there's nothing that they need access to that their web equivalent cannot already do.

2. The web pages are easier to control... i.e. Firefox on Android and ad-blocking is a joy.

3. Most of the web pages get richer experiences sooner than an app (if it ever gets an update), i.e. minisites on news sites around elections.

4. The web experiences are considerably faster on poorer networks.

5. The DNS logs show a massive reduction in tracking frameworks... even though the web is bloated, apps appear to also be bloated, but the web you can more easily control.

6. Better battery life across the board, probably due to nothing running in the background and no notifications being processed - also improved mental health as the device is now on my terms, pulling content when I want rather than being pushed it when an app wants to.

It's overall a far better experience.

signal11• 5 years ago

an Open Source adblocker-style extension that intentionally breaks "do you want to download and install our app..."

While not an extension, the DuckDuckGo browser app on iOS has exactly this feature. Maybe Firefox should consider building it in too!

pojntfx• 5 years ago

Sound more like a feature, not like an issue.

The internet must be more than two proprietary app stores.

dheera• 5 years ago

Is AMP really that bad? It seems to circumvent a lot of paywalls for me and seems to just be a subset of HTML, roughly.

asutekku• 5 years ago

90% of the time I still end up going to the main site instead of reading the AMP article because of the lack of something in the AMP version.

tshaddox3• 5 years ago

I don’t think Amp is that bad. The issue I described where it breaks iOS native app URL listeners is the only reason I am happy to purchase this extension.

tambourine_man3• 5 years ago

I’d pay a good deal of money to have early 2010 style Google back.

Mainly:

- No AMP

- If I quote a string, you better be goddamn sure it’s present on the pages that you show me.

- One ad per query. These days the organic results are after the page fold. This is unacceptable for something that’s supposed to be a search engine.

—-

The second one gets little attention but it’s infuriating to me. I mean, I’m explicitly telling the engine what I want. If it’s not including it in the results, I might as well not even be here typing. Just show me whatever it thinks I want based on everything it knows about me. And no, unfortunately verbatim doesn’t always help.

savanaly• 5 years ago

By verbatim I assume you mean quoting a string. Example query using that that you consider unsatisfactory?

matttb• 5 years ago

After you do a search there's a 'tools' button. Clicking it gives you a dropdown with the option to change from 'all results' to 'verbatim'. There's also the 'Advanced Search' https://www.google.com/advanced_search where even if you enter a word in quotes in the 'this exact word or phrase' box you still get results without your query.

I don't have an example query, but it happens all the time. I put a query in quotes and google gives results that neither have the quote in the page blurb on google nor on the destination page.

gregman• 5 years ago

I think you are describing DDG.

void_mint• 5 years ago

DDG, but actually returning search results.

berkut• 5 years ago

In my experience, DDG is just as bad as Google at producing results that don't match quotes exactly, and almost effectively just adding random results...

It's like they both just want to add something to the results, instead of saying "can't find anything else".

q-rews5• 5 years ago

I happen to use both bing and DDG occasionally and the results are plain bad so I end up using Google anyway.

I should try the opposite though: when Google SERP is useless, try others.

Semaphor3• 5 years ago

I’ve been using DDG for a few years now. They are even worse than google at honoring phrase search. In addition, google sometimes even tells you that they ignored some terms. DDG is just silently searching for some crap you never wanted to search for "to help you". It’s by far my #1 annoyance of DDG.

labster• 5 years ago

DuckDuckGo essentially ignores negated terms. Try searching for `49ers -football` and you get a front page full of football links and nothing about the gold rush.

chongli• 5 years ago

This is symptomatic of the fact that the users are not Google's customers. Google search is intended to direct you to the pages which are most profitable to the company. If you happen to find what you're looking for, so be it. If you don't find what you're looking for (because it's obscure and unprofitable) and instead get distracted by something Google would prefer you to see (because it's profitable) then all the better.

The fact that you're a power user puts you in the minority of (likely unprofitable) users anyway, so Google doesn't mind inconveniencing you. They seem to have a pretty fierce anti-power-user culture, as evidenced by all of the (power user/ hacker popular) products and features they've killed over the years.

We've got a lot of work to do if we're ever going to bring back the web we all remember from the old days.

easton• 5 years ago

I had a funny one today where I had some weird arguments for a CLI thing I was googling, so I put them in quotes, and Google continued to return results with the "not containing: foo bar | show only results with 'foo bar'" thing under them. Clicking the link just put more quotes into the search string, until my search bar looked like: wixl ''''''foo bar''''''.

fnord77• 5 years ago

I remember when you could put a '+' in front of a keyword and it would be in the results ("+keyword").

Then google+ hijacked that and never gave it back.

colordrops• 5 years ago

Also not applying a political, moral, business-driven, or any other bias in returning results that they want me to see rather than what I want to see. It used to nearly perfectly match my intentions with the request until they got too big and caved to the establishment and money.

systemvoltage• 5 years ago

A couple of things.

1) People in charge of these features know objectively how pissed off some of their users are. It's done for one simple reason - it brings more advertisement revenue. Google employs some of the smartest people on the planet and they have the demonstrable capacity to build what savvy users like yourself (and me) like.

2) Vast majority of the people are ambivalent and apathetic to these things. The scale at which Google operates is absolutely mind bogglingly massive. Savvy users are the extreme edgecase.

I just don't see any reason to expect a mass-market product or service to serve savvy users. There is a fundamental mismatch in expectation and requirements.

Causality1• 5 years ago

How about image results that are actually images? Now all you get is videos unless you type half a novel's worth of site remover arguments.

moralestapia• 5 years ago

If I quote a string, you better be goddamn sure it’s present on the pages that you show me.

I'd pay significant money for this (20-30 USD/month), plus very few search operators that actually make sense (i.e. and, or, not).

But yeah, we got AI instead ... (pure crap IMO)

tambourine_man3• 5 years ago

I’ve been craving for a “grep for the web” for decades.

Semaphor3• 5 years ago

Is the quote string to enforce it still usable anywhere? DDG was always even worse than google at this, and I miss being able to search for phrases.

chairmanwow1• 5 years ago

Check out https://neeva.com/

Paid search engine that I switched to last month. Best feature is no ads. You can hook up your private data silos (Notion, Slack, Google, Dropbox etc) and all results appear directly in regular search.

I don’t ever see myself going back to whatever the fuck Google has morphed into over the years.

jazoom• 5 years ago

I'm interested but most search engines give terrible results for Australian searches (increasingly true for Google too, which used to be good at it). How does this one go at not being America-centric?

Update: I'll answer my own question. They didn't even let me sign up.

cannabis_sam• 5 years ago

This all got sacrificed when the mbas and bean counters took charge of GOOG..

xvilka• 5 years ago

What's so bad about AMP? If anything, it makes many news sites more "readable", less junk and distraction. Walled garden? Yes, but so is Apple ecosystem, which is this extension for.

wyager• 5 years ago

Don’t hijack my URLs without my permission. Full stop.

thatswrong0• 5 years ago

Google should let me fucking disable it without having to rely on a safari extension, because it makes many websites less usable / more broken in many ways. My mobile speeds are fast enough.

valine• 5 years ago

It’s glitchy, takes up screen real estate, it’s hyper sensitive to horizontal swipes and will sometimes load an unrelated pages, and instantly forgets your cookies and logins (absolutely awful for sites like Reddit where I want to stay logged in).

That’s my list anyway.

tambourine_man3• 5 years ago

It stupidly and needlessly reinvents scrolling. By doing so, it completely breaks lots of standard and core browser behaviors, such as:

- can’t tap menu bar to scroll back to the very top of the page

- can’t find anything on the page because it breaks built in search (unless you’re lucky enough to have the string visible on the viewfinder )

- old man argument, I’ll admit, but I want the site I’m visiting to be the domain I’m seeing in the address bar. This is the Web, not some Google sub domain.

- scrolling is janky on older iPhones.

Oh, and messes your cookies so you’re never logged in. You need an extra tap to redirect you to the site you actually pay for. And probably a whole lot more I’m not remembering.

q-rews5• 5 years ago

I hate it as much as everyone else, but last time I stripped AMP I got a useless paywalled adridden website so I ended up just sharing the AMP URL

DantesKite• 5 years ago

For me, it's just frustrating and breaks some functionality on web pages.

I wouldn't mind if it made things better or at least, not worse.

rastafang• 5 years ago

Firefox addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/

vincentmarle• 5 years ago

I finally upgraded to iOS 15 today just to be able to download this app. That's how much I hate AMP.

ghostly_s• 5 years ago

Assuming this is a web extension, you'll only be living amp-free in safari. (pretty sure iOS doesnt allow hijacking another domain's universal links?)

q-rews5• 5 years ago

Correct. Some extensions still offer tools via the share dropdown though. This extension could add a “Open without AMP” option in there.

schleck82• 5 years ago

You could just use https://www.amputatorbot.com in this case. The extension's selling point is convenience

bjornstar• 5 years ago

There's already the Redirect AMP to HTML extension, I use it for both Firefox & Chrome

- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-amp-to-ht...

q-rews5• 5 years ago

The point here is that this can be used on iPhone, so there was not already something there.

julianlam2• 5 years ago

... and in typical Apple fashion, it costs money to get it.

jiggawatts• 5 years ago

#1 article on the YC News front page.

#1 most popular "tools" app in the App Store.

Google: Take the hint, please.

franze• 5 years ago

no, they don't care, this is how the ampthtml-team reacts to criticism https://twitter.com/enzenhofer/status/1442821842050428933 #blocked

tones4112• 5 years ago

Take my money

halotrope• 5 years ago

Thank you! If there is one thing where Google went to far its that abomination of bad UX and power abuse called AMP. I was fearing I will never get rid of it on iPhone. Would probably also have paid US$10

unobatbayar• 5 years ago

The developer who made the app is brilliant. Seems like any App he builds becomes a success. Not sure how he does it.

dqpb• 5 years ago

So, this happens almost daily: I’ll be reading news in an amp page hosted by Google, which I navigated to via Google news, within Google chrome, and half way through the article the page suddenly breaks and I see “Aw, Snap! Something when wrong while displaying this web page”.

There was a time in my life when I believed working for Google was the highest indication of talent. Now, I marvel at how a $1.6 trillion dollar company can’t even serve a page of text and images without fucking it up.

Daneel_• 5 years ago

I wonder if Amplosion affects other browsers on iOS too, or does it purely work with Safari? Eg, Chrome or Opera Touch

tediousdemise• 5 years ago

Thank you for doing this!

oceliker• 5 years ago

The name of the developer sounded familiar, so I looked him up — turns out he’s the developer of Apollo, likely the best reddit iOS client.

pjdorrell• 5 years ago

The name reminds me of "DCOMbobulator", another software whose purpose was to turn off something that caused endless trouble and which you never asked for in the first place.

kdunglas• 5 years ago

While it looks great, this app isn’t open-source.

Open-source means that the source code can be freely modified and redistributed. This is explicitly forbidden by the license of Amplosion. The proper term for this kind of licence is “source-available”. The description and the website are misleading and should be updated.

asplake• 5 years ago

Seriously considering purchasing (I hate AMP with a passion), but what’s the nonsense in the reviews about dogs and games and stuff? I don’t need that kind of distraction.

NmAmDa3• 5 years ago

While the extension source is available. The developer deliberately make it non licensed which means it he retains all copyrights and it is not an open source by any useful mean. And he ia quite aggressive about that.

https://github.com/christianselig/Amplosion/issues/1

Arnavion• 5 years ago

I find it weird that both you and TechnologyClassroom in that GitHub issue thread brought up copyright. Even if the developer had used an open source license, they would still have retained copyright. You can complain about the license just fine, but copyright is not relevant to that discussion.

NmAmDa3• 5 years ago

The developer in the r/apple subreddit said that it is an open source and a couple of comments here made that claim also. So I was just clarifying. It is more about

And to be clear about that. That's from github docs

"You're under no obligation to choose a license. However, without a license, the default copyright laws apply, meaning that you retain all rights to your source code and no one may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work. If you're creating an open source project, we strongly encourage you to include an open source license" [1]

And in the developer last comment in the issue he closed he quoted that also to explain that it is not allowed to do anything except seeing code for transparency purpose.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-reposi...

SSLy• 5 years ago

Respectfully, I think this fits the colloquial definition of open source that your average person (myself included) views as open source and would recognize, and I'm more than happy with that.

Fuck your "colloquial definition"

hyproxia• 5 years ago

I agree with you, but he's right in a way: The original purpose of "open source" was to dilute the free software movement, so even though the OSI doesn't recognize such licenses as "open source", it's no surprise why the "average person[/developer]" sees it that way.

evanb• 5 years ago

I'd pay for an app that could do the same for Apple News links.

‎Amplosion: Redirect AMP Links on the App Store

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