Why didn't "drop-down refresh" become a standard function of mobile applications?

However, in many well-known applications such as Instagram and Apple Mail, this function has disappeared. Dustin Curtis, a famous designer, learned in a recent conversation with the developer of Tweetbot that a patent application for "user interface mechanism" that Twitter is currently submitting may be the reason why many well-known applications have not adopted this function. The patent was invented and applied by Loren Brichter, the developer of Tweetie, and was transferred to Twitter after Tweetie was acquired by Twitter. According to this patent, which has not been finally approved, "the system can present scrollable refresh trigger information in a specific form after receiving the instruction input by the user in the form of scrolling. If the user's scrolling instruction reaches the trigger condition, the refresh trigger information of the system will be completely presented and the screen content will be refreshed. " Other parts of the patent application show that the coverage of this function is not limited to updating the list content, but also includes other functions realized through the pull-down operation, such as the pull-down innovative function of the popular list application Clear some time ago. Twitter and Loren Brichter have said that even if the application is approved, they will not enforce it. This guarantee may not be enough to convince prudent applications to use this function with complete confidence. (Via) Why didn't pull-down refresh become the standard? Of course, the patent issue may not be the only reason why this function has not become the standard of in-app refresh function, and many people have initiated discussions on this issue. According to one theory, this refresh method is only applicable to time stream applications sorted by time from new to old, but not to all application types. In social networking applications such as Twitter and Facebook, which present information in the form of a timeline, the most common behavior of users is to check the status updates of their friends from the bottom up. When the content list scrolls to the top, the user's intuitive reaction is to continue scrolling up to see more information. In this case, it is very natural to continue to pull down. At the same time, in order to let the user confirm whether it is really necessary to update, the pull-down update is generally done by pulling down for a certain length before updating. However, for non-list applications, users will not have a drop-down behavior under natural conditions. In this case, the drop-down operation will be difficult for users to find. For example, the popular picture tag of Instagram, the result of refreshing operation is to replace the picture on the current screen with another batch of pictures, instead of adding more pictures above the current picture. Pull-down refresh does not meet people's psychological expectations in this case, nor does it meet the function of the application itself. As for Instagram, it doesn't use the pull-down refresh mode in the friends' timeline tag, which makes it easier to maintain the consistency of operation in the application. Looking at the applications that use the drop-down refresh function, most of them have the characteristics of frequent content updates. Only by using this type of application, users will want to keep refreshing to get more content. However, in e-mail applications with push function and infrequent updates, frequent manual updates are redundant and unnecessary, so pull-down updates are not suitable for such applications. Instapaper, Dropbox and other applications can all belong to this type. RSS readers such as Google Reader are somewhere in between, so we see that RSS readers such as Reeder adopt the pull-down synchronization function, while other RSS readers do not have this function. Although Sparrow is a mail client, its mobile version has no push function at present, and it draws lessons from the characteristics of social networks such as Twitter in many places, so it is not unexpected to add the pull-down refresh function (whether it is necessary for the desktop version of Sparrow is still open to question). On the other hand, today many Twitter applications begin to add streaming function, and new information will be displayed in real time. In this case, the pull-down refresh is actually unnecessary in function. But in order to avoid excessive consumption of users' information, manual refresh may be a better way. In addition, for those who have discovered this feature, it may be very natural to pull down and refresh. But for most users, this function is hard to find, and not all applications can expect users to suddenly "discover" this important function. No design is everything. Pinterest's waterfalls are very attractive, but not all websites are suitable for this design style; Flipborad's plaid magazine design is convenient for news reading, but it does not mean that there are no other equally excellent reading formats; Clear gestures are cool, but many simple "+"add buttons are also clear and easy to use. Any excellent design has its limited scope of application. Instead of making an application better, it may be self-defeating