Several reasons:

- Screen real estate: we simply don't have enough space to put everything

- It's a responsive webapp: if we create a new button just for mobile, then we'll have to hide it for desktops, which means more complexity and testing

- Icon discoverability: our users aren't tech-savvy, so we'd have to create a new button with the word «Refresh» on it, because they could easily miss it if we use an icon (also: screen real estate)

- Familiarity: pull to refresh is a familiar gesture we can take advantage on, and it's easy to disable on desktop

> Icon discoverability: our users aren't tech-savvy, so we'd have to create a new button with the word «Refresh» on it, because they could easily miss it if we use an icon (also: screen real estate)

Wait, so pull to refresh is more discoverable than a circular arrow?

According to our user research, yes. But YMMV.

Basically whatever Facebook does is the most discoverable for the older generations.

There's also accessibility. If I'm using a screen reader on Mobile such as VoiceOver or TalkBack, how do I pull to refresh? It would way easier if there was a button.

That's a good point. How do native apps that offer pull-to-refresh handle this?

> It's a responsive webapp: if we create a new button just for mobile, then we'll have to hide it for desktops, which means more complexity and testing

Don’t you need to refresh on desktop as well?

There's already one, next to your location bar.

Everyone knows how to refresh a webpage on mobile as well though? Why not add in websockets if users need to refresh that often inside a mobile browser?

iOS’ Safari has a refresh button at the right of the location bar too, but I guess you’d prefer to "refresh" only the relevant parts of the application; not the full page. Am I missing something?