For years the easiest way to have a web article read to you on an iPhone was Pocket. Save the page, open the app, tap Listen. It was not the best narration available, but it was there, it was free, and it was attached to the place you already kept your reading list.
Mozilla announced in May 2025 that Pocket was closing, and the service shut down that July, with saved data exportable until 8 October 2025. If you relied on it, you have probably already moved your saves somewhere. What is harder to replace is the listening half: the habit of getting through saved articles in the hours when you cannot read.
This post is about that half. It is written by the people who make ArticleFM, so read it with that in mind; we have tried to be straight about where the other tools are a better fit.
What Pocket's Listen actually did
Two things, and it is worth separating them:
- It kept your reading list. Save from any browser, tag, archive, search. The read-it-later part.
- It read the list to you. Open an article, tap Listen, and a synthetic voice read it while you did something else.
Most of the "Pocket alternatives" lists published since the shutdown are about the first job. That is fair, since it is the bigger job, but if what you miss is being read to, the read-it-later app you migrated to may not do it, or may do it only on a paid tier.
The read-it-later apps that also read aloud
If you want one app for saving and listening, these are the ones we would look at first. All of them are on iPhone.
- Instapaper is the most Pocket-like of the survivors: free to save unlimited articles, with text-to-speech in its paid Premium tier.
- Matter has strong article curation and the best voice quality of the read-later apps; its listening features sit behind a subscription.
- Readwise Reader goes furthest as a reading tool (RSS, newsletters, PDFs, highlights) and reads articles aloud as part of the package.
If your reading list is large and you want to keep organising it, start with one of those. They are good at the job Pocket did first.
Where ArticleFM fits
ArticleFM is not a bookmark manager. It does not try to hold your entire reading list with tags and folders. It does one narrower thing: take an article you have decided to hear, turn it into properly narrated audio, and keep it in a library so you can play it whenever you like.
A few things follow from that focus.
- There is no saving step separate from the listening step. Tap Share on the article in Safari, Chrome, or any app with a share sheet, and choose ArticleFM. Conversion happens in the background and a notification tells you when it is ready. Or paste the URL into the app.
- The narration is the point. You choose from a catalogue of narrator voices, a standard set and a larger premium set, and can preview any of them before converting. The aim is a voice you can listen to for forty minutes, not one you tolerate for three.
- The transcript scrolls with the audio. When a sentence deserves a second pass, you can read it. When your attention drifts, you can find your place.
- It works offline. Save an article to the device and it plays with no connection, which is useful for the tunnel, the flight, and the gym with no signal.
- It plays like a podcast. Background audio with the screen locked, and six playback speeds from 0.75× to 2×.
A reasonable setup, if you liked Pocket for both jobs, is a read-later app for the archive and ArticleFM for the listening: keep saving wherever you save now, and share the ones you actually want to hear across to ArticleFM. Its library is then a short list of things you meant to listen to, not four hundred things you meant to read.
What it costs, and what it cannot read
ArticleFM is free to download with 2 free article conversions to try it properly. After that there is one monthly subscription, ArticleFM Monthly, priced in the app and in the subscription terms.
Like every tool in this category, it cannot read everything. Paywalled and login-only pages, pages that are mostly video or images, script-only pages, PDFs, and articles over our per-article limit can all fail to convert, and a failed conversion does not use up a free article. The support page lists the cases.
Moving your habit over
If you still have your Pocket export, it is a list of URLs, and any of those URLs can be shared to ArticleFM from Safari. We would not suggest converting four hundred of them. Pick the five you would genuinely listen to this week, convert those, and see whether the habit takes.
Download ArticleFM for iPhone, or read how it works first.