If you’ve ever waited for an update to appear on the iOS App Store, either for an available app, an app update itself, or for the Top and Featured pages to refresh, you know that sometimes the App Store can sit stale. While you can often trigger an update to show up by changing the date, quitting and re-launching the App Store, or even trashing the app in question, there’s actually a way to forcibly refresh the entire App Store on an iPhone or iPad without having to do any of that. Instead, you just need to perform a curious repetitive tap trick.



There’s not much to this, and while it will sound a little strange, just try it and you’ll see that it works to quickly force refresh all App Store content and updates on an iOS device:

Open the App Store in iOS as usual if you haven’t done so already

Tap one of the bottom tabs repeatedly (like Featured, Top Charts, Search, or Updates) for a total of 10 times

After the 10th tap the App Store will refresh as the screen of the iPhone or iPad goes white and repopulates with refreshed data

Yup, repeatedly tapping an App Store tab 10 times causes the data to refresh.

It doesn’t matter which tab you repeatedly tap, just be sure to tap the same tab icon over and over again to get the refresh to trigger. All sections of the App Store will refresh regardless of the tab tapped on as well, so even if you want the Updates section to refresh so that you can find a new version of a particular iPhone app, tapping repeatedly on Features will trigger the refresh on screen.

This is basically the same as hitting Command+R in the Mac App Store to refresh any of the stores accessible to OS X, and it’s kind of amazing that up until now there wasn’t really an official refresh mechanism other than some of the various workarounds on iOS to cause a refresh of App Store data.

This is really not well known, and that includes myself. Up until now I’d be refreshing the iOS App Store by quitting the app and relaunching it like some kind of dinosaur, but it looks like this nifty 10-tap trick was originally discovered by iDownloadblog and it works exactly as described. Try it out, as long as you’re up to date with iOS it seems to work.