Pocket (discontinued)
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May 2025: It took me 11 years to update this review. Less than a month later, Mozilla announced theyâre shutting Pocket down this summer. Fortunately Iâd already tried out Wallabag, which is a good replacement for the read-it-later aspect.
Iâve been using Pocket for ages to offload âHey, this looks interestingâ articles from times when I really should be doing something else to times when I have, well, time. And when I say âages,â I mean it: I was using it back when it was still called Read It Later, long before Mozilla bought it.
- It syncs a copy of the article to each mobile device, which means I can see something in the morning, save it to Pocket, then read it on my tablet at lunch.
- Feedly talks to it easily. Back when I used Feedly, I even linked it up with IFTTT so that tapping âSave for Laterâ on the tablet will add an article to Pocket. This also helped make up a bit for Feedlyâs lack of offline access.
- Speaking of IFTTT and online services I donât use anymore, for a while I had it set it up so that saving an article as a favorite in Pocket also added it to Delicious.
- The Android app will accept shares even if thereâs no network connection, then sync up when itâs online. That means I can look over a newsletter in Gmail at lunch, save the links that look interesting, and archive the email. Then I can read the article at work or at homeâŠor the next time Iâm out somewhere, after itâs synced.
- Kobo eReaders can connect to Pocket and you can read your saved articles on something thatâs actually designed for reading.
You can save pages to Pocket using a browser extension for all the major desktop browser types, including Chromium, Firefox and Safari. For others, you can get a bookmarklet from getPocket.com/add while logged in. And just share a URL or page to the mobile app.
Mission Creep
For a while, Pocket had a ârecommendâ button, which let you add a page to a public feed. I thought this was great! It meant I could use one service for bookmarks, saving to read later, and linkblogging!
Eventually Mozilla discontinued manual ârecommendationsâ in favor of an automatic recommendation engine based on what you saved, and what other people were saving. (And sponsored articles, of course.) Your saved articles were âprivateâ from other users, but not from the engine.
A lot of people only know Pocket as âthat annoying thing that shows me sponsored articles when I launch Firefox.â These days Iâm never sure how much theyâre using my bookmarking to train that engine.
And while self-reinforcing algorithms geared toward engagement may be good for the dopamine hits (and a convienient channel to add sponsored articles), itâs not too helpful in the long run.
I finally gave Wallabag a try. Itâs not as polished, but I feel more confident about what itâs doing with my data, and if I really want to, I can host my own server. Plus Wallabag still works on my Poke3 e-reader. I havenât been able to get Pocket to log in on it since it stopped syncing and I reinstalled the app.
Speech Oddities
For a while I used the text-to-speech feature to listen to articles in the car while driving to and from work. Even in the mid-2010s the voice was fairly decent, despite the usual flat tones and lack of natural rhythms.
There were a few oddities, though:
- # is always read as âhash.â This makes it really odd for comics articles, which frequently talk about issue numbers. âBatman Hash 123â just sounds wrong.
- Italics areâŠalwaysâŠemphasis, and presented byâŠpausingâŠrather than changing tone. This makes itâŠawkwardâŠfor anything involving lots of titles.
- It parses words, rather than using a dictionary, and canât always figure out whether initials should be read individually or pronounced as a word. This usually works fine, but occasionally leads to phrases like âtah-kay-down notice,â (takedown) âlink-uh-dinâ (who knew LinkedIn rhymed with Vicodin?) or âpohs terminalâ (POS as in Point-Of-Sale) On the other hand, it figured out âI-triple-E,â so I imagine itâs got a dictionary for special cases.
Theyâve probably been fixed by now. Probably.
