Pocket for iPhone Shut Down: The Best Replacement Apps

If you opened your iPhone looking for the Pocket app recently, you already know: it’s gone. Mozilla shut down Pocket on July 8, 2025, removing the iOS app from the App Store and taking the sync infrastructure offline. This guide covers exactly what happened, what you can still recover, and which alternatives are worth your time on iPhone, iPad, and desktop.

What Happened to the Pocket iPhone App

Mozilla acquired Pocket in 2017 and built it into Firefox as the default read-it-later tool. For years it had tens of millions of users saving articles to read on commutes, on flights, or just later. On May 22, 2025, Mozilla announced it would discontinue Pocket entirely — citing a need to focus resources on Firefox and other core products.

The timeline:

• May 22, 2025: Shutdown announced. New saves still worked.
• July 8, 2025: Service shut down. The iPhone and iPad apps stopped functioning. The web app went dark. Syncing stopped.
• October 8, 2025: All stored user data permanently deleted from Mozilla’s servers.

Users who exported their data before October 8 received a file called ril_export.html — a standard Netscape bookmarks format containing saved URLs and tags. The article text that Pocket had fetched and stored for offline reading was not included in the export. If you missed the export window, those URLs are unrecoverable from Mozilla.

The iOS app itself is no longer on the App Store and cannot be reinstalled. Even users who had it downloaded found it non-functional after the shutdown date, because it required the Pocket servers to sync and authenticate.

The Two Things Pocket Did (and Why They Matter for Picking a Replacement)

Before looking at alternatives, it helps to be clear about what Pocket actually did — because most people used it primarily for one of two things:

1. Clean offline reading. Pocket fetched the full article text, stripped ads and navigation, and presented it in a calm reader view. You could read it offline, on a plane, in a subway tunnel. This is the distinctive feature that no browser bookmarks tool replicates natively.

2. Link saving as a bookmark bucket. Many Pocket users saved links to return to later — without necessarily reading them in Pocket’s reader mode at all. They wanted a universal “save this” button across apps, with sync across devices.

These are genuinely different needs. An app that nails clean offline reading may have mediocre organization. A tool that excels at link organization may not fetch article text at all. Knowing which one you used Pocket for most will save you from switching to something that doesn’t fit.

There’s also a third problem Pocket papered over that most replacement guides don’t mention: link rot. Once Pocket fetched article text, you could still read it even if the original URL later went dead. Without that caching layer, the links in your export — some of which you saved years ago — may already point to 404 pages, expired domains, or sites that no longer exist. We’ll come back to this.

How to Recover Your Pocket Export

If you exported before October 8, 2025, you have a ril_export.html file. Here is how to get those links into Chrome so you can start using them:

1. Open Chrome on your Mac or Windows PC and go to chrome://bookmarks
2. Click the three-dot menu icon in the upper right corner of the bookmarks manager
3. Choose Import bookmarks
4. Locate and select your ril_export.html file
5. Chrome imports all your saved links under an “Imported” folder, preserving titles and original save dates

If you saved your Pocket data as a CSV file instead of the HTML export, you will need to convert it to bookmarks.html format first — several free online tools do this, or you can do it manually for smaller lists.

Once imported, your links live in Chrome’s standard bookmarks system. You can sync them across devices using your Google account. But before you do anything else, consider running a dead-link check: a significant portion of URLs saved years ago will no longer resolve. More on this below.

If you missed the export window entirely, the URLs are gone. However, you can try the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) manually for specific articles you remember saving. If you recall titles or rough topics, the Internet Archive’s full-text search can sometimes surface the right page.

Option 1: Dedicated Read-It-Later Apps for iPhone

These apps are the closest functional replacement for Pocket’s clean reading experience. They fetch article text, strip ads, and queue content for offline reading.

Instapaper

Instapaper is one of the oldest read-it-later services, predating Pocket. It has a clean, minimal reading interface, supports highlights and notes, and has an iPhone app with good offline reading support. The free tier allows unlimited saves; the premium tier adds full-text search and more highlighting features. Instapaper has a direct Pocket import tool, making migration straightforward if you still have your export.

Readwise Reader

Readwise Reader is the most powerful option in this category. It handles articles, newsletters (via a dedicated inbox address), RSS feeds, PDFs, and Twitter/X threads. Highlights sync to Readwise for spaced repetition. The iPhone app is well-built. The downside: it requires a paid Readwise subscription to access Reader fully. If you’re a heavy reader who annotates everything, it’s worth the cost. If you want a free Pocket replacement, look elsewhere.

Matter

Matter focuses on a premium reading experience with strong text-to-speech. If you often listened to Pocket articles while commuting, Matter is worth evaluating. It also handles newsletters. The iOS app is polished. At time of writing, Matter has a free tier with core features and optional upgrades.

GoodLinks (Apple Devices Only)

GoodLinks is an Apple-only app — iPhone, iPad, and Mac — available for a one-time payment of $9.99 on the App Store. It syncs via iCloud (no separate account), has a clean reading interface, and supports tags. For iOS users who want to avoid yet another monthly subscription and don’t need cross-platform Windows access, this is worth considering seriously. No Pocket import tool, but you can use bookmarks import via Safari as a workaround.

Raindrop.io

Raindrop.io is less focused on reading mode and more focused on organized saving. It handles links, images, documents, and articles with strong tag and collection features. The free tier is generous. It has a direct Pocket importer and supports iPhone, Android, and all desktop browsers. If Pocket was your “organized link library” rather than your “reading queue,” Raindrop.io is the closest like-for-like replacement.

Option 2: Safari Reading List (Built Into Every iPhone)

Safari’s Reading List is genuinely underrated for simple use cases. It’s built into every iPhone and iPad, syncs via iCloud with zero setup, and does cache article content for offline reading. You can save any page to it from the iOS share sheet in two taps.

The limitations are real: no tags, no highlights, no full-text search across saved articles, no export. Organization is limited to an unordered list. But if your Pocket use was mostly “save this, read it later this week” — not archiving years of links — Reading List costs nothing and works reliably.

Option 3: Chrome Bookmarks + Dead-Link Repair

If you’re primarily a desktop user who wanted Pocket as a reliable long-term link store — not a clean reading mode — the browser bookmarks approach is worth considering seriously.

Chrome’s built-in bookmarks sync across devices via your Google account, are free, and have no save limit. The problems with bookmarks alone: title-only search, no dead-link monitoring, and no offline article text.

This is where Bookmend fits. Bookmend is a free Chrome extension that adds the layer browser bookmarks have always been missing — and it works directly with your existing Chrome bookmarks, including the Pocket links you just imported.

What Bookmend adds:

• Full-text search: Bookmend indexes the actual content of every bookmarked page, so you can search by what an article said rather than the title you gave it (or that Pocket auto-filled). Search “inflation housing mortgage” and find an article you saved four years ago without remembering its headline.
• Dead-link detection: Bookmend monitors your bookmarks for 404s, DNS failures, parked domains, and soft-404s (pages that return 200 OK but show an error message). Importantly, it confirms a failure twice 48 hours apart before marking a link dead — avoiding false positives from temporary outages.
• One-click archive recovery: When Bookmend flags a dead link, it finds the closest Wayback Machine snapshot to the date you originally saved it. This matters: an archive from the day you saved the article is far more likely to be the version you intended to keep than a random snapshot.
• Duplicate and folder cleanup: Surface exact and near-duplicate bookmarks without auto-deleting anything. You decide what to remove.
• Local-first: Nothing is uploaded to Bookmend’s servers. The index lives in your browser.

For Pocket migrants specifically: import your ril_export.html into Chrome (steps above), install Bookmend, and it immediately starts indexing and monitoring all those saved links. Given that some of your Pocket links are years old, the dead-link scan often turns up a surprisingly high percentage of already-broken URLs — which you can then recover via archive snapshot or remove.

Bookmend does not fetch a clean article reader view the way Pocket did. If clean offline reading was the core of how you used Pocket, a dedicated read-it-later app is a better fit. But for long-term link preservation — links staying findable and recoverable over years — Bookmend solves a problem that read-it-later apps don’t address at all.

See how Bookmend’s dead-link detection works →

Comparison: Which Replacement Fits Your Use Case

What About Android Users?

The Pocket Android app also stopped functioning after the July 8, 2025 shutdown. Android users have most of the same alternatives: Instapaper, Readwise Reader, Matter, and Raindrop.io all have Android apps. GoodLinks is Apple-only.

For Android users who want the browser bookmarks approach, Bookmend works in Chrome for Android in a limited capacity — full extension functionality requires desktop Chrome. For Android-native read-it-later, Instapaper and Raindrop.io are the most straightforward options with Pocket import support.

What to Do Right Now If You Have the Pocket Export

If you still have your ril_export.html file sitting in your downloads folder, here is the sequence that preserves the most:

1. Import it into Chrome via chrome://bookmarks → Import bookmarks (steps above)
2. Install Bookmend to scan for dead links in that imported set
3. For dead links, use Bookmend’s one-click archive recovery to access the closest snapshot
4. For active reading going forward, pick whichever read-it-later app fits your use case from the comparison table above
5. Export your new reading app’s data periodically — the Pocket shutdown is a useful reminder that any third-party service can close

If you missed the export window and the data is gone, focus on your current needs and choose a replacement that offers open export formats so you’re not in this situation again.

If you have a Pocket export file, the fastest path to preserving those links is to import them into Chrome and install Bookmend to detect which of those URLs have already gone dead — and recover them from the Wayback Machine in one click. Free, no account required.