Google announced that the deadline for the switch to a completely mobile-first index has been cancelled and there is currently no date for a final switchover. Postponing the final switch to a mobile-first index was done to accommodate the remaining websites that have not yet updated to a mobile-friendly version.
Google Mobile-First Index
The mobile-first index was intended to be an index of web pages that are mobile-friendly to be used for ranking purposes and for search related features like the snippets.
The reason for moving to a mobile-first index was to better serve the majority of Google search users who primarily used mobile devices to access Google.
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The problem Google was solving was the one of showing search results from websites whose desktop version that was indexed varied significantly from from the mobile versions shown to searchers on mobile devices.
“…our ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content to evaluate its relevance to the user.
This can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because our algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher.”