Pocket is a popular "read it later" app where you can save articles from websites and read them when you are offline or just later. My list is 5 years old and some of my saved articles are totally irrelevant to my current interests but I always have something interesting to read.

As many of you know, Pocket is one of the apps which still have an active beta testing community on Google+. Devs were silent for a while and finally, we got a huge update with many interesting changes.

Full changelog:

It's been a while since we posted here. The team has been heads down on a big update to Pocket for Android, and today we're finally ready to share it with our beta community!

Pocket version 7 has been completely redesigned to feel fresh, clean and modern. New styling, fonts, and iconography all work together to create a design that feels familiar yet new.

In addition, listening has been revamped to include a higher quality default voice and new layout to make it easier to control playback.

The new UI feels fresh and modern. I like the new bottom nav a lot.

The core change was made to the listening functionality. Now, you can tap on the headphones icon on top right and you will see a "music player" UI.

Listening feature

Listening feature was added a while ago and it allowed you to listen to your saved articles with text-to-speech. Version 7 of Pocket beta brought this experience to the new level. Now it feels more like a listening to the podcast and it is really cool.

You can also spot a home button on the bottom nav which works as an app drawer but now it is definitely easier to open.

There are a bunch of social features related to user profiles, following activity and content discovery which existed in the previous version too.

Performance

I cannot say that the app became lighter because it takes some time to load after the first launch. However, it has a good caching implementation because after the first use it runs a lot faster and smoother.

The issue I always had with Pocket was related to some articles not being fully loaded to the app. I saw them in the app but after I tried to open them without internet, they were starting to load again. I did a quick test and didn't manage to reproduce this issue in v7. It may take some time to test it properly but it is a good sign in general.

Do you use pocket as well? How often?