Mozilla Corporation has acquired the developers of Pocket in the company’s first acquisition. Both Pocket and Mozilla posted about the new arrangement on their blogs recently, highlighting their next steps together as allies in achieving their mission of protecting the open web and promoting open web standards. Other than from a Mozilla browser, Pocket can be accessed from Chrome, Safari, and on the platforms iOS, Android, and Windows.
Why Pocket and what happens next?
In 2007, Nate Weiner founded Read It Later LLC or Pocket. As the name suggested, the app's function was for reading things, such as articles, later.
You might have even encountered some other apps that does the same things as Pocket. I used to use Readability, a web bookmarking service that was discontinued last September. In the same flock of reading apps are Instagrams' Instapaper, the ideas sharing app Evernote, Pinterest, and Flipboard.
According to Mozilla’s blog post on February 27, about the alliance, Pocket has successfully brought in 10 million unique monthly active users through what they call “a human-powered content recommendation system.” The way Pocket syncs content is to line them up across devices and platforms, so any content that has been saved to Pocket will become visible on any device. The company will continue as an independent part of the Mozilla Corporation, with developers working from the same office, except now Mozilla will fuel them.
We've got some big, exciting news! Pocket is joining forces with @Mozilla. Read all about it here: https://t.co/R4jwQ7cNg6 pic.twitter.com/hWtlhmxquA
— Pocket (@Pocket) February 27, 2017
Mozilla's open source plans and Pocket's money
With this acquisition, Pocket becomes a part of Mozilla’s product portfolio and open source project, so it's highly likely that Pocket will start open sourcing its codes now.
Firefox, Mozilla’s web browser, was ranked second in 2015, before the launch of Microsoft Edge. According to data from StatCounter, as of December 2016, Chrome remains the most popular web browser, with Safari and UC Browser coming in second and third. Firefox comes in as fourth with 6.72% usage shares. Pocket officially began its integration within Firefox in June, 2015, when the humble add-on app blossomed into an integrated ‘Pocket for Firefox’.
Neither Mozilla nor Pocket disclosed the value of the new deal on their announcement posts, but according to data gathered by innovation hub Crunchbase, Pocket has a total of $14.5M in equity funding coming from 3 funding rounds. They also did not specifically disclose the details of Pocket’s role in Mozilla’s open source project. Pocket itself was not known as Pocket until 2012, when the app launched a new version allowing users to sync their reading lists across devices. Pocket disclosed that year that people were saving a whole bunch of things to read later, not just videos and articles, but images, recipes, shopping lists, and other interesting things.
