Mozilla Kills Pocket and Fakespot

Eight years after it acquired Pocket maker Read It Later, Mozilla announced that it is shuttering the service. The organization is also closing the Fakespot browser plugin.

“We’ve made the difficult decision to phase out two products: Pocket, our read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, our browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews,” the Mozilla announcement explains. “It’s imperative we focus our efforts on Firefox and building new solutions that give you real choice, control and peace of mind online.”

Pocket shuts down on July 8, 2025, but users won’t be able to download it or purchase a new Pocket Premium subscription effective immediately. If you already have a Premium subscription–annual or monthly–it will be canceled now, and you’ll get a refund in July. You can export the contents of your Pocket library of saves until October 8, after which time the data will be permanently deleted. You can learn more about this on the Mozilla Support website.

Fakespot will shut down July 1 across browser extensions, mobile apps, and the web. The integrated Review Checker feature in Firefox, which is based on Fakespot, will shut down earlier, on June 10.

I was a long-time Pocket user–I recommended it back in March 2016–but I switched to Instapaper for read it later functionality last year because I found the Mozilla sign-in requirements tedious given how many different computers I use. Instapaper is the closest thing to Pocket I found, and while I do still sometimes test other similar solutions, I like it quite a bit and can recommend that as well. You can learn more here.

As for Pocket, I get it, but I’m surprised Mozilla couldn’t find an organization to pick it -up–plus Fakespot, too- and keep it going.