One Year Without Pocket – Byline<br>← All articles One Year Without Pocket
By Pavel Hamrik · July 8, 2026 · 5 min read
The old promise was saving articles. The next one is context.
One year ago today, Pocket shut down.
Mozilla had announced the end in May, politely, with a support page and an export guide. On July 8, 2025, the app stopped being a reading list and became an export page.
I can’t claim a personal loss. I had left Pocket years earlier, after it started feeling unattended: the same screens, the same small frictions, year after year. But when a category-defining product ends, the category has changed.
For eighteen years, Pocket had been a simple offer, and the original name said it plainly: Read It Later. Save the thing now, come back when you can pay attention.
The promise gave readers a place outside the feed: a way to keep something for a better moment.
Saving the article does not give you context to interpret it.
Who is writing? What do they know? What are they asking you to believe?
Is this a reported claim, an argument, a summary, a sales pitch, a partisan frame, a recycled press release? What deserves trust, and what needs another tab?
Context is the part I keep coming back to a year after Pocket.
The hard part was choosing where to go next.
Export was the mechanical part. Mozilla kept export open until the fall.
The harder question was where to go.
On Hacker News, where the shutdown announcement gathered more than twelve hundred points, one longtime user pointed at a smaller but telling frustration: after a change to Pocket’s Discover tab, “you could no longer see the source of the article.” That is closer to the issue than permanence. Reading software shapes what context readers keep or lose.
People were not just moving libraries. They were deciding what they wanted reading software to do next, and whether moving was worth the effort at all.
The readers scattered.
Instapaper, Pocket’s rival since the beginning and a survivor of three changes of ownership, became the closest default migration path. Kobo picked it to replace Pocket on its e-readers.
Readwise Reader took the power users: people with highlight pipelines, long workflows, and a willingness to pay.
Matter took the design-minded Apple crowd, the readers who care as much about feel as features.
Raindrop took the organizers, especially people who think in tags, folders, and collections.
Wallabag and Karakeep took the self-hosters who wanted their reading list on infrastructure they controlled.
ElevenLabs, the voice company that absorbed Omnivore’s team, turned toward audio, betting that the reading list of the future is something you press play on. They are onto something here.
That scattering showed that the category is still alive, but no longer has one obvious center. Some readers want the quietest possible surface. Some want highlights and workflows. Some want design polish. Some want ownership. Some want audio.
What almost everyone wants is more confidence that the time they spend reading is time well spent.
Reading needs more context now.
Reading is not where most attention goes anymore. The shift toward social and video platforms is real. That is not a moral failure; video is better at faces, and faces are most of what we want from each other.
But much of the work that needs scrutiny still arrives in text: investigations, scientific results, court rulings, reported features, technical explanations, arguments that need evidence more than affect.
So the gap is not simply that people read less. It is that the material most worth reading often asks for more patience, context, and skepticism than the internet is built to provide.
A saved article is not enough. A clean reader mode is not enough either. The next reading app should help you arrive with context: who published this, how credible is the source, what claims is the article making, what should I pay attention to, and where should I be skeptical?
That does not mean turning reading into homework. The point is to make understanding less effortful: who is speaking, what they know, what they claim, and how much confidence to place in it.
Listening belongs in that picture too. Synthetic voices have crossed a threshold, and attention often arrives as a walk, a commute, or doing the dishes rather than one neat block at a desk. If the valuable thing is chosen attention, software should respect the different ways people can give it.
This is the direction I want reading software to go.
I make one of these apps now, so read this with that disclosure.
It started with a bug that wasn’t mine to fix. I was using a read-later app I admired — still probably the best-designed one in the category — but a sign-in issue had gone unfixed for years. I wanted to see what I could build, and I was solving my own problem.
The longer reason came later. I do not think the world needs another off-the-shelf read-later app. Saving is table stakes. The interesting...