Google's open-source alternative to Facebook Instant Articles and Apple's News app is getting closer to becoming reality.

Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) will be accessible through Google Search "early next year," the company announced in a blog post. Google says that 4,500 developers have signed up for the service so far, and contributions and sample requests on GitHub to its codebase have already exceeded 250.

AMP is Google's response to the growth of the mobile Web. Many of us read our news from phones or tablets, but the ad experiences there can be cumbersome and result in slow-loading websites that irritate readers or prompts them to install ad blockers. That's why Facebook introduced Instant Articles, which are hosted by Facebook and load much faster than links that must redirect to outside sites, and why Google is exploring AMP.

A wide range of publishers have signed up for Google AMP, including News Corp., The New York Times, Washington Post, and several others. Ad networks like Outbrain, AOL, OpenX, and its own DoubleClick and AdSense have also committed to AMP.

AMP was announced in October as a means to "dramatically improve the performance of the mobile Web."

"We want webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously," Google said at the time. "We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instantno matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you're using."

For the average user, this will likely only affect them in the sense that pages might work much better and faster on mobile. For publishers, though, it's a decision about whether they want to align themselves with a behemoth like Facebook or Google, and what that might mean for them in the future.

Two companies that definitely don't want to align themselves with Google at the moment are TripAdvisor and Yelp, which complained recently that search results for their businesses on mobile were getting buried under results for Google services. Yelp and Google have battled over this for years, and it's been the subject of Congressional hearings and EU investigations. Google, however, told Re/code that this issue was a problem with a code push.

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