readulatorPocket stopped working on July 8, 2025. Mozilla kept an export tool open until November 6 of that year, and then everything left behind was deleted: saved articles, highlights, notes, favorites, the whole archive. If you're reading this because you still haven't replaced it, you're in a large crowd.
Readulator is a read-it-later app for iPhone and iPad. This page is an honest attempt to tell you whether it's the right replacement for you, including the parts where it isn't.
The lesson worth taking from it.
Pocket saved a copy of the article text. That was the good part, and it's the part people miss. What went wrong wasn't the feature, it was where the copy lived: on someone else's servers, behind someone else's business decision, reachable only through an account that could be switched off. Years of reading vanished on a schedule announced by press release.
Readulator's answer is simple to the point of being boring. Your library is a file on your phone. Articles, summaries, tags, highlights, and reading progress are stored and processed on the device. There's no account, no login, and no copy of your library on our servers, which is also why nobody here can take it away, sell it, or read it. The Settings screen has a button that exports every saved link as a Markdown list, and another that deletes everything permanently. Both take one tap.
If this project shut down tomorrow, the app on your phone would keep working, offline, exactly as it does today.
Side by side.
| Pocket (until 2025) | Readulator | |
|---|---|---|
| Where saved articles live | Mozilla's servers, tied to an account | On your device, no account |
| Saving something | Share sheet, browser button, email | Share sheet, clipboard, browser extension |
| Platforms | iOS, Android, web, Kobo | iPhone and iPad only |
| Listening to an article | Text to speech, one at a time | A queue you build, with Lock Screen controls |
| Summaries | None | Written on-device by Apple's models |
| Recipes, films, albums, photos | Ordinary saved links | Parsed and filed into their own lists |
| Recommendation feed | Yes, and eventually in Firefox itself | No. It only shows you what you saved |
| Price | Free, with a $44.99/year Premium tier | Free during the beta, App Store price not set |
The row that matters most is "platforms," and it's the one where Pocket was better. Be honest with yourself about it before you read any further.
Where Readulator is genuinely better.
You can listen to your whole backlog
Saved articles go into a queue and play like a podcast, with Lock Screen and CarPlay-style controls, artwork, and your position remembered per article. It reads the article, not the page: no navigation menus, no cookie notices, no URLs spelled out letter by letter. This turns the pile you feel guilty about into something you get through on a walk.
Summaries you can trust with anything
Each item shows a headline and a few lines of summary, written by Apple's on-device models. Nothing is uploaded to a summarizing service, which means it works on a plane and it works on things you'd never paste into a chatbot. It also means no per-month AI fee.
It knows what kind of thing you saved
A recipe becomes ingredients and steps, without the 2,000 words about the author's trip to Tuscany. A film becomes a card with cast and synopsis. Books, albums, games, and podcasts get the same treatment, each in its own list. A screenshot of text becomes readable text. A Bluesky or Mastodon thread comes in unrolled as one clean article.
No unread count, anywhere
Pocket's list grew forever and quietly became a monument to everything you didn't read. Readulator's Stream is swipe-to-clear, items you don't get to age out on their own, and archived things stay searchable without sitting in your face. There is no badge, no number, and nothing nagging you.
Where it isn't the answer.
- You need it on Android, Windows, or the web. There's no version and there won't be. This is an Apple-platform app.
- You read on more than one device and expect it to follow you. Your library lives on one device. A browser extension can send links from your computer to your phone, but your phone and your iPad each keep their own library, and there's no sync between them yet.
- Your iPhone is older than an iPhone 15 Pro, or you're not on iOS 27. The summaries run on Apple's on-device models, which need recent hardware and this year's OS.
- You want the Pocket discovery feed. Readulator has no recommendations, no trending list, and no editorial picks. It shows you what you chose to save.
- You have a Pocket export sitting in a folder. There's no import for it yet, so a large archive would mean feeding links in by hand. If this is your blocker, say so on the mailing list below; it's the most-requested thing that would move up the list.
The other places people landed.
It would be strange to write this page and pretend the alternatives don't exist, so:
- Instapaper is the closest thing to Pocket still standing, and it's been independently run since 2018. It's on more platforms than Readulator. There's a longer comparison on its own page.
- Readwise Reader is the serious research tool of the group: RSS, PDFs, EPUBs, highlights flowing into note-taking apps, and a genuinely good web app. It's also the expensive one, at $9.99 a month billed annually, and it wants to be your whole reading system rather than a place to put an article for later.
- Raindrop is a bookmark manager first. Excellent if what you actually lost was an organized set of links with collections and tags, less so if what you wanted was the article text saved for offline reading.
Readulator's pitch against all three is the same and it's narrow: the text is on your device, the AI runs on your device, there's no account, and you can listen to the whole backlog.
Free while in beta · iPhone or iPad with Apple Intelligence, on iOS 27
Not ready yet? Get one note when it ships.