Criticism has been raised at pull-to-refresh for causing unwanted refreshes when the user is in the process of scrolling upwards, and for resembling a lever on gambling machines and thus supporting social media addiction.
Brichter developed Tweetie, an iOS application for Twitter, as a personal project in 2008 after he quit his job at Apple Inc. in 2007.
Although it provided users with the ability to refresh their Twitter feed, the button utilized valuable screen real estate that Brichter wanted to use for other features.
This final iteration also included text alerting users that if the top of the page is pulled beyond a threshold and subsequently released, a refresh would occur.
[9] However, since the gesture has now become so universal that users implicitly expect it to be part of the mobile app experience, it is hard for developers to move beyond it.
Brichter is quoted in the article saying "The fact that people still call it ‘pull-to-refresh’ bothers me—using it just for refreshing is limiting and makes it obsolete...I like the idea of ‘pull-to-do-action’.” The article concludes by stating that rather than being used exclusively for refreshing, vertical swipe interactions should now evolve to perform other actions, thus giving birth to a new style of app interactions.
Arnott adds that having the ability to manually refresh is still important to allow the user assurance that the content they are viewing is indeed up-to-date, and that pull-to-refresh is brilliant design since users would be scrolling to the top anyway if they wanted to see new content and refreshing is a logical extension of scrolling, as opposed to a different action to which a pulling gesture would be less intuitive.