Mozilla shuts down Pocket – and a part of my past
According to Mozilla "the way people save articles and discover stories on the web has evolved". And seemingly Pocket did not, so it has to die on July 8, 2025.
I am fine with that decision. I stopped using Pocket years ago. Not that I would not like to anymore but because the idea of reading it later somehow stopped working for me. I joined the camp read it now or most probably never.
So what's the point?
Many years ago Pocket was an important part of my life. When I began commuting by train between home and university (and later work) I started reading a lot of books and online articles.
This was the perfect application for a service like Pocket.
Problem was, I owned a Windows Phone.
Windows Phone was the new kid on the block. Next to iOS and Android it was the underdog but had a vital and very enthusiastic developer community with not that many apps yet.
I can't remember exactly how it came to be that I started working on a Pocket app for the OS but that's what has happened.
In the beginning I had no clue how to write mobile applications as I came from a web background and my only excursion to apps were Flash and Silverlight.
I put all my soul and energy into building the app. It had to be perfect. About half a year into development I started a beta phase with ~10 people from the Windows dev community I got to know via twitter (RIP).
In February 2014 my Pocket app "Poki" finally launched as a paid app (3$ price tag) on the Windows Phone 8 store – and it immediately went through the roof.
The good times
It's hard to put into words what has happened from this point on. People loved the app, its design and ease of use. My friends from the Windows Phone community spread the word, news magazines wrote about it and I somehow got famous, holy cow.
I was invited to Microsoft Austria to speak about my app and the future, I was assigned a personal mentor from the Windows Phone core team at Microsoft US and was giving a lot of interviews (online and even one on the radio).
The Pocket team announced that Poki would become the official Pocket replacement on Windows Phone and Poki won several app of the year awards. In the same year Poki 2 was released on Windows Phone and on Windows 8 as a free app with a premium model.
In the meantime I and a few other devs created a Slack community which grew up to hundreds of well known Windows developers and Microsoft employees.
Those were the peak times.
Post mortem
I am not famous anymore, dang. I left twitter (which was my digital home in those days) and despise what it has become – you can find me on 
mastodon now.
There were a few reasons why all of this didn't work out in the long term:
- I stopped using Poki myself after I stopped commuting
- Not many people wanted to pay for apps anymore
- I lost the current source code (with about a year of updates)
- Mozilla acquired Pocket and abandoned the developer API
- Windows Phone died and with it my passion
Shutting down Pocket puts the final nail in the coffin.
I made a lot of friends from all over the world thanks to my app. And all of this was only made possible due to the existence of one fantastic little piece of software called Pocket.