Kobo Plans a Hot Swap of Pocket for Instapaper (And Pocket Lives on as Folio)
I’m thrilled to learn (via episode #573 of the Upgrade podcast with Myke Hurley and “Mr. Kobo” himself, Jason Snell) that Kobo has announced a new partnership with Instapaper to replace its Pocket integration:
In partnership with Instapaper, Kobo is working diligently to bring this integration to its eReaders, with the aim of launching by the end of summer 2025. The new Kobo and Instapaper integration will take the place of Kobo’s previous integration with Pocket after that service is sunset in June 2025.
Instapaper echos the announcement in their own blog post, which includes helpful links for importing Pocket content to Instapaper:
Since the Pocket shutdown, our top priority has been to help Pocket users migrate to Instapaper. Pocket users who have made the switch praise Instapaper on its clean, distraction-free reading experience, and robust organization tools.
We’re excited to be partnered closely with Rakuten Kobo to power the read-it-later functionality on their Kobo eReader devices!
I already swapped (back) over to Instapaper as my read-it-later service when Pocket shut down, primarily because it has the same great and easy integration with Reeder Classic — my RSS and all-around reading app of choice.1 And now that Instapaper will sync saved articles to my Kobo later this summer, it really is a hot swap solution.
Good on both Kobo and Instapaper for stepping in to help out Pocket’s users.
Also of note, and likewise learned on Upgrade, the team from Pocket appears to have broken off to basically recreate it as Folio. It’s available on the web and the App Store, and looks just like Pocket did.
In my brief testing, Folio imported my Pocket saves without issue, and its text-to-voice feature actually beats what Pocket had. Its (single) voice sounds more natural, speeds up without sounding bad, and — my favorite2 — actually announces blockquotes by saying, “Quote.”
Although I’m going to stick with Instapaper due to its integrations outlined above, I’m happy to see that the Pocket team is still making a go at it. And perhaps has more leeway on their own to improve the product. Certainly, Folio is an app to keep my eye on.
I essentially never open the Instapaper app itself. I only have it installed so that I can use its Share sheet extension to save articles I find outside of Reeder. Unfortunately, saving things with it is notably slower than Pocket was. Pocket’s extension dismissed automatically pretty quickly, but you could dismissed it even faster with a single tap. Instapaper’s extension requires several swipes to dismiss, or you have to wait longer for it to go away automatically. I might work on a shortcut that could save things more smoothly.↩︎
The best blockquote support in text-to-voice that I’ve ever come across was in the also-semi-recently-sunset Omnivore. It would read blockquotes in an entirely different voice. Much like how in Ben Thompson’s podcast versions of all his Stratechery articles, someone from his team voices the (many) blockquotes, this format provides fantastic clarity when listening to an article. In the read-it-later app that I aspire to build one day on
Pocket’sInstapaper’s infrastructure, this feature it’s at the top of the to-do list.↩︎