Is it time to kill pull-to-refresh?

Pull-to-refresh is by now as familiar a part of interface design as anything that can be found on mobile devices. Is it time to put it out to pasture? FastCo.Design pondered that question after the recent release of Instagram Direct, hinging its argument on the fact that most devices today are powerful enough to handle background updates. After all, seeing a steady stream of tweets would be far more useful than having to refresh over and over again. Elsewhere, apps like Jawbone’s Up app have moved to a “pull-to-action” model that provides the user with valuable, glanceable information that makes the vertical swipe worthwhile. Some might call that innovation. Might a paradigm shift create some fragmentation and even user confusion? Maybe. But, for FastCo, that’s be a risk worth taking.