Pull-to-refresh
touchscreen gesture
Pull-to-refresh is a touchscreen gesture developed by Loren Brichter. It consists of touching the screen of a computing device with a finger or pressing a button on a pointing device, dragging the screen downward with the finger or pointing device, and then releasing it, as a signal to the application to refresh the contents of the screen. Other names for the gesture include "pull-down-to-refresh", "pull-to-reload", "swipe to refresh", "scroll to refresh", and variations thereof.
The purpose of the gesture is to make refreshing immediately accessible. 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.
History
The pull-to-refresh gesture first appeared in the Tweetie mobile application developed by Loren Brichter. Brichter developed Tweetie, an iOS application for Twitter, as a personal project in 2008 after he quit his job at Apple Inc. in 2007.
While Brichter was initially developing Tweetie, he wanted to add a refresh function to the application. Regarding other mobile applications of that time, he said "They all had to find a spot and just cram a refresh button somewhere.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q25313523. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pull-to-refresh” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.