This bug appears to happen for me only on the 1.0 site and on my ancient iPod touch (running Skritter 2.2.1 - 2013-06-08), but not on the 2.0 site. So I can understand if you’re less inclined to fix it, but it’s gotten quite irritating to me. For, I would say, at least the past month, about every time I look at my vocab lists, the vocab lists that I have not created always have the “updates!” notification. When I click on the notification, there are no recent updates. And then the dismissed “updates!” notification returns soon after.
How about now? Checking on this end it looks like none are showing up anymore. If you’re still seeing the (updates!) notification, I recommend clearing the cache on your browser and local data on the iOS app. https://docs.skritter.com/article/13-local-data
When I was writing up the post I checked each of the lists to make sure none of them were updated recently, and that dismissed [temporarily] the notification. I just refreshed the study page that lists these lists, and I see “JLPT N4” and “Katakana” have the notification again (the rest do not). And the iOS app shows the same. Checking the “updates” for one list in the iOS app (here, “Katakana”) dismisses the notification on both platforms.
I then cleared the cache on my browser (Firefox 55.0.2 (64-bit) on Ubuntu) and reloaded the Study page. Now the lists “JLPT N4” and “JLPT N5 (Easiest)” have the notification (I assume this is just due to time elapsing, not because I cleared the cache). I’d like to hold off on clearing the iOS app’s local data if I can, as the app (or, probably more accurately, my iPod Touch) is showing its age. I’d rather not poke them too much if I can help it.