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Pocket has been getting steadily worse over time, this account development doesn’t really surprise me at all. There’ve been no improvements to the actual core Pocket functionality in years, the recent Android app overhaul has been borked (for example, all my old annotations were missing from the app for about 4-5 versions), the competition is rising (Omnivore, Readwise, Wallabag, Tefter, etc.) and Pocket is locking down and actually complicating features and adoption.
I used to be a premium subscriber, until I noticed that there are articles they can render in reader mode but just refuse to, even though a simple URL hack loads the text in reader mode just fine. On top of that, I conducted extensive testing and not a single one of the articles in my archive had a proper local Pocket backup, which was the main thing I was paying them to do. Apparently since all URLs were online, they didn’t bother with creating backups.
I’m still using Pocket to sync articles to my Aura One, mostly for very long form articles. However, I migrated everything to Wallabag - none of the "discovery" features, just text+images, backups of everything, with full file exports, highlights with annotations, and a fast interface, for 10€ a year. Once my Aura croaks, I’ll probably switch to a Boox device, since they can use the Wallabag Android app.
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