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I have a mobile app where there is a refresh button at the top of the listview. I also have a built in pull-to-refresh feature.
The internals of the app are now always "live", thanks to SignalR and smart usage of push notifications.
When the feature of pull to refresh is not needed, how should the app respond? Should I keep the feature there, and give the user the feeling that they were able to refresh the data.
Even though your data is always up to date, users like the perception that they can control the data stream or information refresh rate and hence I would recommend keeping the Pull to refresh so that users can exercise that action (even though it might not pull in new data). To quote this article from UX booth
The human need for control can be traced back to our earliest roots. In psychologist Abraham Maslow’s well known hierarchy of needs, he identifies our most basic needs as the physiological ones: health, food, and sleep. All of these require a significant amount of control—control over our environment in order to gather food, and control over our own choices to avoid disease.
It’s therefore unsurprising that we seek out control in everything from our relationships—everyone has “put their foot down” at some point or another—to the color of our living room walls—even though the old color was fine, it wasn’t perfect. It’s ingrained in us, and it gives us a sense of comfort and well being.
This sense of control is very closely linked to what psychologists call an “internal locus of control,” or the belief that our actions have the power to impact and change a given situation. (Conversely, an “external locus of control” is the belief that we are at the mercy of external sources.) People with an internal locus of control are more likely to be confident, take better care of themselves, and have lower levels of stress.
As UX designers, we try to ensure users will have positive experiences when using our products or accessing our services. This often translates into empowering users, thus giving them the tools to find their internal locus of control
Since you also want the user to be informed about when the data was last refreshed (either by a manual refresh or a dynamic refresh), I would also suggest showing them information inline on the last refresh state as shown below
