FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Facebook, Google, and Apple Want to Fix a Problem That Pocket Already Solved

Read it later apps made mobile news consumption easy years ago.
Image: Pocket

If you're a consumer of online content, you probably already know that over the last couple months, Facebook, Apple, and Google have all invested serious resources into trying to change the way we read articles on our phones.

Facebook wants to display its "Instant Articles" directly in your news feed, Apple wants you to read articles in its "News" app, and Google's newly-announced solution promises to display articles as "lighter weight" webpages.

Advertisement

Mobile reading has already been solved, though. By an eight-year-old smartphone app.

More than 17 million people have downloaded Pocket, which is essentially a "save" button for the internet. It strips the text and photos from a story and displays it in a Kindle-like app that is customizable, blazing fast, and optimized for reading. Pocket also allows you to read articles offline.

"Read later" is quickly becoming "read right now"

The worst part about reading articles on a mobile device isn't waiting to click through an ad or navigate a clunky interface (though those hurdles can be terrible on certain sites): It's accessing the content at all, which is Pocket's main advantage over the Facebook, Google, and Apple solutions.

Speaking from personal experience alone, if I'm actively reading articles on my phone, there's a decent chance I'm on public transportation, in a doctor's office, or standing in line somewhere. None of these places are particularly conducive to using mobile data, being located underground, in decades-old buildings, or amongst lots of other people.

Pocket and other read later apps such as Instapaper are usually used for #longreads, but recently they've become a very good way to read news shorter articles as well. Back in August, Pocket introduced a "recommended" tab, which suggests articles based on the ones you've already saved making it possible to find new articles without ever leaving the app.

Thanks to that feature and its integration into most social networking apps and mobile web browsers, "Read later" is quickly becoming the "read right now" that Apple, Google, and Facebook are all vying for.

Facebook, Apple, and Google can probably beat Pocket on their size and pervasiveness alone—no one in the media industry looks at Pocket as an existential threat.

But, as a reader? Why bother with any of these new news "solutions?" Pocket solved mobile reading years ago.