Nicely packaged for easy use. I initially thought this a bad idea for reasons that others mentioned (primarily re-implementing an existing gesture). However,

Nicely packaged for easy use. I initially thought this a bad idea for reasons that others mentioned (primarily re-implementing an existing gesture). However, it occurred to me that much of SPA development involves doing exactly this, particularly where nav (i.e. routing URLs and handling back/forward buttons) is concerned. Managing these involves hijacking existing browser behavior to supply our app-specific behavior instead. So, overriding pull-to-refresh is consistent with this hi-jacking as you generally do not want the full page to refresh in a SPA any more than you want the back button to take the user out of your app to a previously visited site. But, I don't think it's a good idea for non-SPA webapps. All of that said, it also does seem like a notification-type paradigm would be a better UX for the particular use case you shared. But, hey, if your users are happy...