Pocket, formerly known as Read It Later, is a

social bookmarking Social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share Internet bookmark, bookmarks of web documents. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious (website), Delicious, founded i ...

service for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks, first released in 2007.

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

, the developer of Pocket, announced in May 2025 that it was discontinuing the service and would shut it down in July of that year.

History

Pocket was introduced in August 2007 as a

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curren ...

browser extension named Read It Later by Nathan (Nate) Weiner. Once his product was used by millions of people, he moved his office to

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...

and four other people joined the Read It Later team. Weiner's intention was for the application to be like a

TiVo TiVo ( ) is a digital video recorder (DVR) developed and marketed by Xperi (previously by TiVo Corporation and TiVo Inc.) and introduced in 1999. TiVo provides an on-screen guide of scheduled broadcast programming television programs, whose fea ...

directory for web content and to give users access to that content on any device. Read It Later obtained

venture capital Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

investments of US$2.5 million in 2011 and $5.0 million in 2012. The 2011 funding came from

Foundation Capital Foundation Capital is a venture capital firm located in Silicon Valley. The firm was founded in 1995, and in 2012 managed more than $2.4 billion in investment capital. As of 2023, the firm has over $6 billion in assets under management. Histor ...

Baseline Ventures Baseline Ventures is a venture capital investment firm that focuses on seed money, seed and growth-stage investments in technology companies. The company was the first seed investor in Instagram, an early investor of Twitter and has been called " ...

Google Ventures GV Management Company, L.L.C. (file no. 4726690) is a venture capital investment arm of Alphabet Inc., founded by Bill Maris, that provides seed, venture, and growth stage funding to technology companies. Founded as Google Ventures in 2010, th ...

, Founder Collective and unnamed

angel investor An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital to a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertible de ...

s. The company rejected an acquisition offer by

Evernote Evernote is a note-taking and task management, task-management application software, application developed by the Evernote Corporation. History Evernote was acquired by the Italian technology company Bending Spoons in November 2022. Usage ...

after showing concerns that Evernote intended to shut down the Read It Later service and amalgamate its functionality into Evernote's main service. Initially, the Read It Later app was available in a free version and a paid version that included additional features. After the rebranding to Pocket, all paid features were made available in a free and

advertisement Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a Product (business), product or Service (economics), service. Advertising aims to present a product or service in terms of utility, advantages, and qualities of int ...

-free app. In May 2014, a paid subscription service called Pocket Premium was introduced, adding server-side storage of articles and more powerful search tools. In June 2015, Pocket was included in Firefox, via a toolbar button and link to a user's Pocket list in the bookmark's menu. The integration was controversial, as users displayed concerns for the direct integration of a proprietary service into an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

application, and that it could not be completely disabled without editing advanced settings, unlike other third-party extensions. A Mozilla spokesperson stated that the feature was meant to leverage the service's popularity among Firefox users and clarified that all code related to the integration was open source. The spokesperson added that " ozilla hadgotten lots of positive feedback about the integration from users". On February27, 2017, Pocket announced that it had been acquired by

Mozilla Corporation The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of open-source developers, s ...

, the commercial arm of Firefox's non-profit development group. Mozilla staff stated that Pocket would continue to operate as an independent subsidiary but that it would be leveraged as part of an ongoing "Context Graph" project. There were plans to open-source the server-side code of Pocket, though only parts of the project had been open-sourced as of 2024. On May 22, 2025, Mozilla announced that it would shut down Pocket on July 8, 2025. Exports of user data would be available until October 8, 2025, when accounts would be deleted.

Functions

The application allows the user to save an article or web page to remote servers for later reading. The article is sent to the user's Pocket list (synced to all of their devices) for offline reading. Pocket makes the article more readable by removing clutter and enabling the user to add tags and adjust text settings.

User base

The application had 17 million users and 1 billion saves, as of September 2015. Pocket was listed among ''

Time Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...

'' magazine's 50 Best Android Applications for 2013.

Reception

Kent German of CNET said that "Read It Later is oh so incredibly useful for saving all the articles and news stories I find while commuting or waiting in line." Erez Zukerman of ''

PC World ''PC World'' (stylized as PCWorld) is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013, it has been an online-only publication. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal tec ...

'' said that supporting the developer is enough reason to buy what he deemed a "handy app". Bill Barol of ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917. It has been owned by the Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes. The co ...

'' said that although Read It Later works less well than

Instapaper Instapaper is a social bookmarking service that allows web content to be saved so it can be "read later" on a different device, such as an e-reader, smartphone, or tablet. The service was founded in 2008 by Marco Arment. In April 2013, Arment ...

, "it makes my beloved Instapaper look and feel a little stodgy." In 2015, Pocket was awarded a Material Design Award for Adaptive Layout by Google for their Android application.

References

External links