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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

If pull-down refresh were invented today it would definitely be called an anti-pattern and the evidence of the regression of Apple.

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Agree. I know some people want that. Me though, I'm 85% done filling in some format, I scroll up to reference something that's off the screen, the effing 'pull-down to refresh' triggers and I have to re-enter everything I just frustratingly spent time entering with mobile input being so shit.

IMO this should never have existed. if X or whatsapp or some site wanted pull-down to refresh they can implement it. 99.99% of sites do not need it.

I can't really see how? It doesn't have any affordance and discoverability is rather low; but there's feedback and a modicum of discoverability. It's useful [to me].

Now, WhatsApp have a pull-down feature that starts a voice note or voice chat or something ... it's awful, if you scroll down in a chat it is really easy to trigger by accident.

They also have a big button at the bottom right to start some sort of recording. Were they trying to get people to start recordings by accident? Does that help them somehow?

My grandfather is continually unintentionally starting group voice chats because of that ridiculous design choice.

He has one going right now.

???

BS claims about a universe that doesn't exist, to sound nihilistically cool.

Except in the early days of smartphone, people pushed back against pull-to-refresh[0][1][2]. Android devs were confused why it was a thing. It's a design with zero discoverability - how do you know what would happen when you pull down? Perhaps the app would show a search bar. Or pinned posts if it's a forum board. Or ask you to review the app? How do you know pulling down is a gesture at all?

The only reason pull-to-refresh got accepted is that it came so early that the UX of smartphone app wasn't well established. Before pull-to-search or pull-to-whatever had a chance.

> nihilistically

It's quite nihilistic to think history doesn't exist and things were born as they are currently.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201204045158/https://www.fastc...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120331181045/http://android.cy...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/vbt6d/pull_to_r...

If it has zero discoverability, nobody would be using it today.

Discoverability is more than simply visual cues. Seeing other people do it counts.

> Zero discovery

It's on a desire trail. Users discover it by scrolling up. Which, presumably, most users do?

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