The Mozilla Foundation’s dearly departed app, Pocket, is finally and truly dead. After two stays of execution ever since Mozilla announced in May that it was shutting it down, the day of its latest permanent deletion, November 12, came with a page update that confirmed all user data has finally been deleted.
Pocket was a popular app, acquired by Mozilla in 2017, that let you save articles across the internet for later reading. If you’re torn by the loss of Pocket, or pleasantly intrigued by the newfound knowledge that such an app existed, the app may be gone, but the concept lives on in these other apps.
Free alternatives to pocket
If you’re looking for the most Pocket-like replacement, check out Instapaper. Farther afield is RainDrop.io, which I’d describe more as a sleek, cross-platform bookmark manager. There’s no offline reading mode for free, so it’s not quite the same as Pocket. If you pay, you can create a “permanent copy” that allows you to read the article, even if it changes or disappears from the original website.
And then there’s Matter, aimed more at iOS and iPadOS. If you’re an Apple user who appreciates an app that shares a similar aesthetic, give Matter a look.
Not up for installing a new app? You can use the Google Chrome browser’s built-in Chrome Reading List, although you have to be using the Chrome browser in order to take advantage of it. Likewise, Apple’s Safari browser has Safari Reading List that functions in a similar way to Chrome’s, but you have to be using the Safari browser on an Apple device.
You miss out on the above standalone apps’ greater organization, offline reading, and search, though. Think of them as lightweight alternatives for those who are opposed to installing another third-party app on their devices.
If you’re looking for a way to export your articles you’d saved on Pocket, you should’ve been quicker. They’re all gone. But come on, you had since May 2025 to download them, even after the app itself quit letting you add new articles and fully use them on July 8, 2025.
“The Pocket API was disabled on November 12, 2025, concurrent with the end of the user export window and the beginning of data deletion,” read a Mozilla support page, updated around noon Eastern Standard Time on November 12, 2025.
“If you previously installed the Android or iOS apps on your device, they can no longer communicate with Pocket’s servers, and users should delete the apps to prevent future confusion.”
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