Pocket is shutting down this week: Here are 6 great read-it-later alternatives for your iPhone

Macworld

I’m an avid reader of articles on my iPhone, and for years I’ve used Pocket to help me discover and save fascinating content and consume it in my own time. I was devastated by the news that Pocket will be shutting down for good on October 8, but I’ve been hunting for alternatives and I think I’ve found some excellent apps.

Whether you’re looking for a brilliant Pocket substitute or are new to the read-it-later game, these iOS apps will serve your reading needs well. Here are our picks.

Safari Reading List

We’ll start with Safari’s Reading List feature, which is Apple’s own read-it-later solution that’s built right into its web browser. The obvious benefits here are that it’s both free and doesn’t require you to download any third-party apps. It’s just an extension of an app you may already use.

Saving an article is easy. Just browse to the page in Safari, tap the Share button, then select Add to Reading List. You can find your saved articles by tapping the Show Bookmarks button (it looks like an open book), then tapping theReading List tab (it resembles a pair of glasses). Now you just need to select an article from the list, and it will take you to the web page. Safari’s Reading List packs in offline reading, iCloud syncing, and a handful of integrations with the Shortcuts app.




Reading List in Safari
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Safari’s Reading List is fine as a fire-and-forget solution, but it’s pretty limited compared to dedicated read-it-later apps. That mostly comes down to how basic it is: you don’t get tags, highlighting, archiving, or design customizations. There’s no Apple Intelligence or article discovery, either, and its widgets are pretty lackluster. But if all you need is a central place to store your saved articles, it’s a good choice.

Matter

Of all the apps here, Matter probably comes the closest to Pocket. That’s because it offers its own tab of curated articles from around the web, which you can then save to the app. If you’re looking for something that finds articles for you–rather than putting all the onus on you seeking them out yourself–it should be top of your list.




Matter for iPhoneFoundry

It also boasts a wide range of smart features that elevate your reading experience. That includes a Perplexity-powered artificial intelligence (AI) called Co-Reader that suggests and answers to questions you might have about the article. And if you love podcasts, you can export episodes to Matter, which transcribes their text and lets you read along to the audio (this is well integrated with AirPods–just double-tap an earphone stem to automatically highlight a paragraph as it’s being spoken).

Matter also features a highly customizable design, highlights, tags, notes, and favorites, a button to scroll down to where you last read, and much more. It’s one of the best options if you want a Pocket-like experience for your saved content.

Instapaper

Instapaper is a popular read-it-later app, and it’s easy to see why. It’s been carefully tailored to the needs of bookworms and bibliophiles, and if you find yourself missing Pocket now that it’s gone, Instapaper is a fine replacement.

Its built-in AI can summarize your articles and include key highlights and passages. We also appreciate how it automatically filters out “read more” sections and other irrelevant elements on a page, allowing you to focus entirely on the article itself.




Instapaper for iPhone
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Power users will find themselves well served by Instapaper, too. It comes with 14 shortcuts to help build powerful automations, while the app and its behavior are highly customizable, with features like swipe gestures, haptic feedback, prompting and more all able to be altered. Its Speed Read tool, meanwhile, blazes words on the screen one at a time so you can swiftly skim through each article.

Readwise Reader

While Readwise is an app for organizing highlighted passages in articles and books, Reader (from the same developer) is all about saving articles. It’s stuffed with handy features, like a Daily Digest that helps you catch up on past saves, a Later list for articles you want to come back to another time, and a Wiseread section that surfaces the most highlighted articles and passages of the week.




Readwise Reader for iPhone
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Readwise Reader comes with its own AI called Ghostreader. Once you’ve highlighted some text, you can ask the AI a question or get it to summarize the copy, elaborate on it, create a quiz based on it, or translate it to Spanish. There’s also a “pick up where I left off” AI tool that finds a chunk of text from before your current location and sums it up, helping you remember where you left off. The AI’s prompts can even be customized to your needs.

The app’s home page can be tweaked to your liking, as can the reader. Speaking of which, Readwise Reader has one of the most attractive reading panel designs of all the apps we tried. There’s no question it’s a brilliantly put-together app.

GoodLinks

GoodLinks is the power-user reading app par excellence. It comes with a huge array of shortcut–28 in total–that let you build powerful automations with its toolset. There’s also an extensive range of widgets for your iOS Home page, and this is another area where it dwarves its rivals.

The care extends to the app itself, which looks lovely with its careful sprinkling of colorful touches. It feels like an app that Apple itself might have designed. Unsurprisingly, you can adjust both its appearance and functionality to your liking.




GoodLinks for iPhone
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GoodLinks is also one of the few apps here to use iCloud for cross-platform syncing, and it works on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, helping you read well on whichever device you have to hand. It’s also the only app to use a pay-once model, with no subscription–pay $9.99 and it’s yours to keep forever.

Raindrop.io

If all you want is a simple, no-frills reading app that gets out of your way, Raindrop.io is a popular choice. It has everything you need to save, read, and manage your favorite articles, including highlights, tags, notes, favorites, cross-device syncing, coworking tools, and a customizable interface, making it easy and enjoyable to use.




Raindrop.io for iPhone
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Aside from the usual tags and filters, your articles can also be organized into collections, which is a great way to separate your saved content and find it more easily in the future. We also like its backup tool, which takes regular offline copies of your saves. It can also be plugged into Dropbox and Google Drive for simple storage.

Raindrop.io is the most affordable subscription app here, with its premium membership costing $2.99 a month. That gets you AI suggestions for tags and collections, full-text search, permanent copies of your saved articles, daily backups, and more.