The Sky is Falling! Read-Later App Pocket is Shutting Down!
(Translated from the Chinese version with the help of Claude.)
(Like the previous blog post, this one is also nostalgic.)
What Happened
On May 22, 2025, Mozilla announced that Pocket would be shut down on July 8th. I learned of this terrible news on May 26th, and my heart was shattered:
Woc, 天塌了!
— David Feng (@davidfeng88) May 26, 2025
Around 2010, when I first encountered read-later apps, I found them interesting on one hand, but confusing on the other: wouldn’t it be enough to just bookmark articles to read later in the browser? But after trying them out, I found features like cleaning up webpage formatting quite useful. Initially, I was torn between the free Instapaper and ReadItLater. Later, it seemed like Instapaper started charging, so I wholeheartedly embraced ReadItLater. In the early days, saving articles on iPhone seemed to require setting up a bookmarklet in Safari, which was quite complex. Later, perhaps when iOS opened up permissions and native apps became available, the user experience improved dramatically.