[kelnos]

Instagram and Facebook (at least on Android) is also a fine example of getting auto-refresh wrong. If I'm scrolling down the feed and stop for too long, or hop out of the app for a minute and then come back, often it'll refresh the feed and kick me back to the top. That's never what I want. I'd rather manual-only refresh to that.

GMail does a good job of being up to date, except when switching networks or resuming from sleep. It'll certainly eventually sync properly, but that can take minutes, and whacking the Refresh button fixes that in seconds.

I've also found that Refresh will surface very-new mail sooner than just waiting. Whacking Refresh while waiting for an email verification or password reset always makes it appear faster than just waiting.