Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, what next?

I was saddened last week to hear news about Mozilla shutting down Pocket. I’ve been a happy user since before it was called Pocket, before it was purchased by Mozilla. I even had a lifetime premium account.

In their farewell post, they say

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.

For quite a while already I’ve felt me and Pocket have been moving to opposite directions so I guess this was to be expected. They’ve been more concerned about recommendations and pushing content rather than being satisfied with serving users with a great read-it-later service.

While Pocket is shutting down, Mozilla continues with our commitment to high-quality content recommendations in Firefox.

I really wished their commitment would have been to providing a high-quality read-it-later service rather than keeping pushing the content I don’t want to see.

Now I guess I need to start looking for an alternative. I’ve spent the last weekend exploring what’s out there and trying out a few options.

Regardless of where you decide to go next, now is a good time to export your data. Pocket offers a CSV export so you can save your data before the service is shut down.

What am I looking for?

Here’s my use case and some of my needs and what I don’t want:

I use Pocket to quickly capture an interesting article so I can a) read it later when I’m offline and b) move it manually to my notes when I have a better moment.

I don’t care about recommendations in the app. In Pocket, I never looked at them. It’s a service for me to store stuff I care about, not learn about new stuff.

First, I need it to have a mobile app or mobile Firefox extension: something where I can easily save a page directly from the browser without copy-pasting stuff. Using the Share functionality is fine.

Second, I want a reader on both Android and iOS that sync my saved articles to offline use. I’m often in a situation where I have no access to Internet and for those moments, Pocket has been wonderful.

Third, I want this functionality to be the main focus of the product/service, not an afterthought or cash grab by a company building a million other things.

Fourth, like I mentioned, I don’t care about recommendations and related, I also don’t want any AI bullshit there because that usually tells me their focus is on something very different than what I care about.

What options exist?

I’ve been collecting recommendations and some of these I’ve tested more than others.

wallabag

wallabag has been a strong candidate so far. I’ve been receiving a lot of recommendations for it and I started my 14-day trial with their hosted solution. It’s open source and can be self-hosted but before I go setting up my own servers, I wanna give it a proper test. Their 11 euros per year subscription for hosted service doesn’t sound too bad either.

Sarah Rainsberger wrote great documentation for how to set up the browser extension and it works similarly with the Android and iOS apps. I got them all set up and connected with my account and with the first few days of testing, everything works really well.

I like how focused it is. It’s matching all the four requirements that I have and they don’t try to be anything else. Reading through their GitHub issues it also seems they are commited to building a good and focused software instead of trying to cram all the possible ideas into the app.

linkding

Another one that I’ve heard a lot of good about is linkding. It’s similar to wallabag that it can be self-hosted with hosting options available. I was initially worried about the lack of mobile apps but then learned that there are third party options like Linkdy for Android and LinkThing for iOS.

Initially, it feels a bit more focused on being a bookmark manager than for reading articles but I need to give the mobile apps a change to see what they bring on top of the base software. For example, I couldn’t find any info about the offline capabilities which are important for me as I travel and want to have access to articles to read.

GoodLinks

GoodLinks looks really nice but the lack of Android support is a deal breaker for me.

If you’re exclusively in the iOS ecosystem, it might be worth checking out. According to Reddit comments, it also syncs the articles for offline reading.

I like that they offer a single purchase instead of a subscription.

Readeck

Readeck is an early contender in the game. They currently offer a self-hosted version with a promise of hosted offerings coming in 2025.

The current lack of mobile applications is a deal breaker for me currently but I’m gonna keep an eye on them to see if they build them one day:

There's no mobile application at the moment but some development is underway.

edit: A reader let me know via email that there are community-built mobile apps! Readeck Sharing for iOS and ReadeckApp for Android.

Linkwarden

Linkwarden offers self-hosted and a cloud hosted service with a 14-day trial.

They provide a handy comparison to Pocket if you want to see what you can expect. For me, there’s a lot of things that they focus on that I don’t particularly care about and their “Read-it-later Experience” being “Limited” seems like we won’t be moving towards the same direction so I’ll skip Linkwarden for now.

Readwise Reader

A friend described Readwise as “the new 800 pound reading gorilla, but seems to be more oriented towards research and annotating than just reading”.

Reading through their website, that’s a very accurate description and it’s putting me off a bit. I want to steer away from “everything apps” that try to do too much. I already have RSS readers I enjoy using, as well as an epub reader and other services they offer.

They are building it as a local-first application which is a good approach for a software like this. They also have apps for Android and iOS although I have not tested them out yet but they seem to have a good UX.

Raindrop.io

Raindrop was another service that was recommended to me. It feels more like a bookmark syncing service than a read-it-later app though. It has good support for browsers and mobile devices but the lack of offline mode is a deal breaker for me.

Inoreader

Inoreader has been active in marketing their offering after the announcement of Pocket’s sunset. I’ll mention it here because someone else might be interested in it but my earlier experiments with them as a RSS reader was quite a big turnoff for me and I’m not even interested in entertaining the option of using them as my Pocket replacement.

They had a really aggressive email onboarding after signing up and I wasn’t quite happy with some of the UX decisions — I felt like their focus was on building a lot of functionality spreading across different use cases which I don’t want to see in my RSS reader nor my read-it-later app. You mileage may vary so maybe give them a go and decide yourself.

Will someone else continue Pocket?

Over the weekend, we also heard some rumours about companies being interested in buying Pocket from Mozilla before it shuts down. It’s interesting news to follow but I’m definitely not counting on anything happening and even if someone does, I’m always bit alarmed and careful with such moves as there’s always the option that someone is buying a product mainly to gain access to your data.