Shutting Down Pocket
Peter Steinberger (in February):
Is Pocket dead? Extension isn’t updated anymore.
Pocket will no longer be available after July 8, 2025.
You can continue using the app and browser extensions until this date. After July 8, Pocket will move into export-only mode. Users can export saves anytime until October 8, 2025, after which user data will be permanently deleted.
Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today. Discovery also continues to evolve; Pocket helped shape the curated content recommendations you already see in Firefox, and that experience will keep getting better. Meanwhile, new features like Tab Groups and enhanced bookmarks now provide built-in ways to manage reading lists easily.
[…]
This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs, smart search and more AI-powered features on the way.
It’s not a surprise to me given how poorly the app was treated after Mozilla took it over in 2017. The read it later service became almost unusable and I had gradually moved away from my reliance on it for bookmarking web links. My move away quickened once they decided to discontinue the Mac app. Making it a web only app ironically led to a pretty horrible user experience.
Previously:
- Instapaper 9.1 and Send to Kindle Extension
- The State of Mozilla
- Mozilla Shutting Down Pocket for Mac
- Mozilla Acquires Pocket
Update (2025-05-22): You can import from Pocket into EagleFiler.
Update (2025-05-23): Juli Clover:
The company also plans to end work on Fakespot, a browser extension and website that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews.
Pocket, for example, is the only read-it-later service supported on Kobo e-readers.
Just one day after Mozilla confirmed it’s shutting down Pocket, Digg co-founder and chairman Kevin Rose has stepped up with a public offer to take it over.
I was an early user of Pocket back when it was still called ‘Read It Later’. That name said literally all you needed to know about what the service did. It was a bookmarking service to yes, be able to read something later. In an era of increasingly open tabs, and when web browsers still gushed leaky memory like a geyser, it was a godsend. And when it transformed into a fully formed service, just as mobile apps were rising, it was perfect. You could save something you came across while browsing the web and yes, read it later on your phone. The device in your pocket.
Pocket quickly became my most-used app and I, at one point, became the top overall user of the service, I was reliably informed. Top 1% eat your eyes out.
When we relaunched in 2012, the mobile apps became hybrid web apps. Almost all UI was UIWebView. And to my knowledge (at least while I was there) not one person ever noticed. We got great reviews for performance and native UX.
I think they were rewritten since. But in 2012, tools to build hybrid apps barely existed, and concealing them was impossible. And we pulled it off.
See also: Slashdot.
Previously:
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What is going to happen with the Kobo Sync integration ?
I hope Kobo can move to another provider like Instapaper
They kind of broke it when they took over “managing” it, IMHO. I switched to a mix of Safari Reading List (which synced better with my devices) and ArchiveBox (self-hosted page archival), and never looked back.
Jesus. Has evolved into what? Pocket was great, I've been using it every day for at least a decade. Anything I come across on the web and want to check out later, I Save to Pocket. It's like my own personal archive of cool stuff. Some things I read a few days later and delete, other things I've kept forever.
Any suggestions on a suitable replacement? I don't even mind paying a reasonable fee like $10/year. It has to be cross-platform, 1-click to add a link, and ideally supports tags.
@Ben G: I like Raindrop.io [1] as far as paid service goes. I'm also running Linkwarden [2] self hosted. It works well, but is not as polished as Raindrop. Raindrop is $28/year and Linkwarden is $36/year if you aren't self hosting it.
Raindrop's free tier isn't bad, but you have to pay for some of the more advanced features such as archiving the content and full-text search. It has polished browser extensions, mobile apps, and desktop apps.
Linkwarden has good automatic capture in that it will create archives of the content of the page in several formats including PDF. There are browser extensions and mobile apps for it, but they aren't as polished as Raindrop's offerings. It doesn't have a free tier for the hosted version, but it does have a 14 day free trial.
[1]: https://raindrop.io/
[2]: https://linkwarden.app/
They open-sourced what seems to be all of the code required to get it back up and running:
Hopefully, someone will do that or make it easy to self-host. In my opinion, there is no alternative to Pocket, which is not just a bookmark manager and not just a read-it-later tool, but a combination of the two.
I do tend to agree with Plume though. Raindrop and Linkwarden are great for storing references to information you might need later, or want to take notes on, etc. But less great for caching things to read later. I'm already paying for Feedbin, so I should probably just get around to really using its read later service for that specific thing.
An interesting decision was that a few years ago they replaced web view with collection view for showing the article’s content. Each text paragraph/block is a separate cell. See https://github.com/Pocket/pocket-ios/tree/develop/PocketKit/Sources/PocketKit/Article/Cells
