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.
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.[1]
Other names for the gesture include "pull-down-to-refresh", "pull-to-reload", "swipe to refresh", and variations thereof.[2]