Today Mozilla announced that they plan to shut down Pocket on July 8th, 2025. There’s already a notice up on the Pocket website about the closure, and the Pocket app and extensions will no longer be available to download from app stores after today, May 22nd.
If you already have the Pocket app installed, you’ll still be able to use it until the shut down date on July 8th. That’s also when annual subscribers will automatically receive a prorated refund for any remaining months paid for in advance. Mozilla has also disabled new subscriptions and automatic renewals.
Pocket users have until October 8th, 2025 to export their Pocket saves. According to Mozilla, all user data and saved articles will get deleted after that date.
Since Kobo has long-advertised Pocket-integration on their line of ereaders, it’ll be interesting to see how they handle this. A couple years ago when Pocket started requiring a Firefox account to login, it was thought that Kobo ereaders would lose Pocket support, but they ended up working things out so Kobos could retain Pocket support. Unfortunately, there’s no turning back this time.
With Pocket going away, Kobo users will have to find a new way to read web articles on Kobo ereaders (if you know of any good alternatives, please leave a comment below). Last time Kobo was quick and responsive about finding a workaround to keep Pocket support, so hopefully they can find an alternative this time. Keep an eye on the Kobo support website; they’ll probably add a notice about the closer soon.
If you have questions about Pocket closing down in general, check this Pocket help article for more information about the upcoming shut down. Pocket isn’t the only service getting axed; Mozilla also announced they’re putting an end to their Fakespot web browser extension and website.
I would *love* to see Instapaper offered as an alternative! They have always been a better alternative to Pocket.
Yes, totally agree! Pocket never handled images very well… as in they weren’t there half the time.
I briefly tried instapaper but was disappointed. Where pocket would easily grab all pages from multi-page articles, instapaper wouldn’t even grab the first page. Instead, it grabbed the cookie banner. Inoreader seems to do better. At least it grabs the first page and also pictures, but it still doesn’t automatically download the following pages.
I always thought that Pocket did the “right thing” 90% of the time unless the source website was just so hateful to such readers and blocked them. I.e., Pick up only the images that matter to the article, and, when in doubt about the website design, ditch the image all together. And I really wish Pocket had a “No really, strip all the images out, please” option.
I haven’t tried instapaper. Will try..thanks
Really liked Pocket on Kobo!
I just got a Kobo and was loving the Pocket feature. Losing the Pocket is so disappointing
Instapaper. Never liked it, but it’s been years now since I have tried it. I guess I will try it again.
Kobo. Pocket and their smooth integration with libraries were huge selling points for Kobo for me. (And the fact that they are not Amazon.) I have zero doubt that Kobo will pick up some Pocket-like tech. Heck, they may do it in house.
Sorry to be a downer, but Kobo never does anything in-house and they’re super passive businesswise. All they do is sell ebooks and a few ereaders; they aren’t a big business by any means, and they barely even do any software development anymore as they’re only releasing 1 or 2 minor software updates a year.
Wallabag has an integration with KOreader which works really well on Kobo!
Oh! That’s interesting.
They certainly won’t do it, but I would be happy about Wallabag support.
Isn’t is a shame that Kobo can’t just purchase Pocket
That would’ve been the best option.
Apparently, Mozilla released all of Pocket as open-source software on GitHub over the past several years, so Kobo could just pick that up and run it themselves. See: .
The Pocket clients and the back-end server are available under either the Apache License Version 2.0 or the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0.
That’s lowers the bar for someone taking it over, but … you also need to invest in maintainers, a likely very robust back end, etc. And, of course, it will likely make you no money. 🙂 (Hence, Mozilla is dropping this cost center.).
Arrrghh. Reading web articles on an e-reader is a big reason I bought a Kobo. If anyone has any other (non-Kindle) ideas for how to do that please share.
I don’t have a Kobo anymore and this is a slight pain but WebToEpub on the Chrome Web Store is pretty good (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/webtoepub/akiljllkbielkidmammnifcnibaigelm).
You’d just need an easy way to get the epubs on the Kobo. Maybe try https://send.djazz.se/
This is the main reason I bought a Kobo. I hope they come up with a solution, but unless Kobo changes their general lack of investment in reading anything besides books I will likely switch to Boox or another more capable platform.
Promising to see Kobo’s CEO respond to this! “We’ll be looking at new options for web clipping because long web reads are amazing, especially on an ereader.” https://www.threads.com/@mtamblyn/post/DKAXPEpgtLT
Well if Michael Tamblyn(pretty sure he is still CEO of Kobo), says they are looking into it…they probably are. There is some hope.
very sorry to loose Pocket, am starting to use Instapaper but accessing saved articles from my Kobo Clara HD doesn’t seem easy. Hopefully the Kobo people will offer a solution
It was relaxing and non-distracting to read pocket articles on my Kobo, so I’m sad to see it go. I looked at raindrop.io and readwise.io, but in the end I went with Instapaper. It’s similar to Pocket and has been around a while.
DotEpub is a nice extension for browsers that will convert any web page (or pocket article) into a ePub ebook. I’ve been saving all my favorite articles I have in Pocket and putting them into a colllection named ‘Articles’ in my Kobo Libra 2. I wouldn’t wait until July 8th to see what Kobo may offer…
http://www.inoreader.com offers migration of database from pocket to its in built read later feature.
in fact after reading your article here I litereally went on their website (my preferred rss reader) just to see a popup to migrate pocket data to inoreader.
so my workflow would usually have been using the save to pocket integration button within inoreader and then read and sync the articles later on my kobo. now that pocket is being axed I just sent inoreader a hint to maybe offer their read later service to rakuten to be integrated into kobo ebook-readers.
lets see what comes out ouf this. maybe if enough people start sending them requests for such a collaboration and integration it might take off.
anyways, thanks for your post