Five Great Read-Later Apps That Will Replace Pocket

Posted on May 29, 2025 by resourcefulman

Mozilla recently announced that it will be shutting down its book-shelving app Pocket on July 8, 2025. If you’re a fan like me, now is the time to start looking for alternatives. You have until October 8 of this year to export your saves from Pocket, so start testing now to find a suitable replacement for reading books shelved.

Use your browser’s reading list feature

Credit: Pranay Parab

I’m a big fan of recommending simple tools, since you’re likely to use them. Browser-based reading lists definitely fall into this category. Both Chrome and Safari have built-in reading lists that let you save articles to read later. Safari’s version saves articles for offline reading, but Chrome simply loads the saved page. Technically, you can save articles for offline reading in Chrome, too, but the browser treats it as saving the entire web page and storing it in files that you have to manage separately. This is much less convenient than simply marking an article as read and deleting it from your device.

Use Reading List in Safari by tapping the Share button and tapping Add to Reading List . To access saved articles on your iPhone, tap the Bookmarks icon in the Safari tab bar, then the glasses icon. In Safari for Mac, tap the sidebar button next to the green button in the upper-left corner of the browser window and select Reading List in the sidebar. To save articles offline by default on your iPhone, go to Settings > Apps > Safari , scroll to the bottom, and turn on Automatically Save Offline . On a Mac, it’s in Safari > Preferences > Advanced > Reading List .

Google Chrome’s Reading List is under the three-dot menu > Bookmarks & Lists > Reading List in the desktop browser. On Android, tap the three-dot menu and select Star . On Chrome for iPhone, it’s under the three-dot menu > Add to Reading List .

As convenient as browser reading lists are, they lack some features compared to full-fledged read-it-later apps, such as tags, organizing articles by topic, or creating custom folders.

Instapaper: The Closest Alternative to Pocket

Credit: Instapaper

Like Pocket, Instapaper was first launched in the late 2000s, and the service is still going strong. It offers apps for Android, iPhone, and the web, and has a generous free tier that lets you save, organize, and sync unlimited articles. However, the free tier displays a few ads to fund the service. A premium subscription costs $6 per month or $60 per year and adds useful features like full-text search, offline reading, and ad removal.

The best paid features, however, are the speed reading and the ability to send articles to Kindle. Speed reading highlights one word at a time, helping you read articles faster. The send to Kindle feature is also quite good for longer texts that you would prefer to view on an e-ink display.

GoodLinks: A Great Read-Later App for Apple Devices

Credit: GoodLinks

GoodLinks is a great read-later app for all your Apple devices. You can buy it from the App Store for $10, which will allow you to access the app on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The app allows you to highlight text in articles, color-code your selections, and makes it easy to find highlighted content. You can easily save articles for offline reading from any website by simply using the share sheet. The app also recently added support for saving Bluesky themes, which is a nice addition. GoodLinks doesn’t require you to create an account and uses iCloud to sync your reading lists across devices.

What do you think at the moment?

Note that the app gives you free feature updates for one year after your initial purchase. After that, you can continue to use GoodLinks with the features you paid for. If you want additional features developed in the future, you can pay $5 per year to access them. However, the app already has almost all the features you might need, so this business model will not lock you out of anything you need.

Readwise Reader: The Best Read-Later Service for Power Users

Credit: Readwise

Some people want a read-later service that can accommodate multiple types of content, including videos, text, social media posts, newsletters, and even entire books. Readwise Reader is designed to do just that. It lets you highlight text in any text file and even YouTube video transcripts, and syncs those highlights across all your devices. You can even send highlights to apps like Obsidian or Notion. The app also creates a “daily digest” for you, which is a quick digest of your saved articles that can help you catch up on important reading at a glance.

The service also gives you an email address to sign up for newsletters, and you can also use it to follow RSS feeds of publications you like. Readwise Reader is an all-in-one app that offers much more than just a read-it-later service, which is great for power users but may be overwhelming for those who just want to save an article for reading on the weekend. Readwise Reader has a 30-day free trial, after which it costs $10 per month.

Question: For those who value newsletters above all else

Credit: Matter

Matter is a premium read-later app for iPhone, iPad, and the web. While it has a free tier, almost all of its best features are available with a paid subscription ($15 per month or $80 per year). The service also gives you an email address you can use to sign up for newsletters and have them sent directly to Matter. I prefer this approach to having newsletters delivered to my already overcrowded inbox, and Matter’s choice of fonts and distraction-free reading make it even better. If you’re a paid subscriber, Matter can also scan your Gmail inbox and automatically pull newsletters from there. For starters, the service offers you a list of articles to read, much like Pocket, which may appeal to some.