I’ve been a heavy user of Pocket since the very beginning. It dates back to May 2016 (9 years ago) before Mozilla bought it and integrated/shipped it with Firefox. While Pocket was my backbone of all things I found on the internet to organize things and find articles again, there were always features missing and sometimes the extension was quite buggy. It never got the deserved love from the creators, and so the decision to shut it down is a sad one, but not a surprise one to me. I’m finally forced to find a better alternative which was overdue long time ago.
A better alternative
If you have been using Pocket and are now looking for an alternative. Give Raindrop.io a try. Its features match those of Pocket and are even more useful and some more on top.
Let’s quickly dive into what Pocket was for me and what it solved.
Save and tag
My most basic need was to store articles and tag them to find them again. As easy as that. I read endless articles during a work day, and sometimes I find something interesting, but I don’t have time to read it, so I save it in Pocket or I found it interesting and want it make searchable for me later. While I use the browser extension heavily for that, on the go I use the mobile app even more to store articles. So Pocket is the backbone of all the informations I consume online and trying to organize them somehow by giving them tags to find them later again.
Search
Pocket listed all the articles on its website, but when it came to finding articles again, it completely failed. The search was really bad, and they never managed to fix it. I sometimes thought of using their API, throwing my stored articles into an Algolia search index, and building my own search interface. Luckily it never came that far since I it wasn’t high on my priority list. Now with the notice that Pocket is shutting down, I’m off for a better alternative anyways.
Highlights
Although Pocket supported a highlighting feature, its implementation was poor, and I rarely used it. It was not convenient to do so, and later on, it proved to be of little use. I’m a huge fan of web highlighters, particularly features like Medium.com’s highlight feature and a startup called Highly, which was bought by Twitter years ago and disappeared sadly.
Pocket’s downfall
While Pocket offered some premium features to keep permanent copies of saved articles or better search and tag suggestions, which should make it more useful, it also failed to deliver on these promises. After using the premium version for quite a while and never questioning how useful it is, I decided to get rid of it and imagine what, I wasn’t missing anything. So they’re premium wasn’t worth it.
Without a deep understand and research of how it came to the shutdown/decision. Me as a year-long user, would say that if you there would be some proper focus on some key features, it would have been a great service. I felt that development was staling for years. So no wonders better competors came up and probably took over users. Now with the shutdown, they’re the lucky once. Lazy users like me are finally forced to switch.
Other alternatives
When searching for Pocket alternatives. Two main services are popping up. Web Highlights & Raindrop are coming up. I tried both and decided to continuing focusing on Raindrop. It includes all my needed features from Pocket and they’re actually working, plus some useful extra features. They have a browser extension to store articles from the desktop browser, mobile apps to store articles easily from mobile. The search is working, tagging and even highlights.
Conclusion
After I’ve tried alternatives, I ended up migrating everything over to Raindrop.io and after using it happily for months, I don’t want to look back and wondering why I didn’t switch earlier.
P.S. This isn’t sponsored or affiliated with Raindrops. It’s just my honest experience with the service, and I recommend it to everyone.
Check it out at https://raindrop.io/