I've been playing around a little reverse engineering the protocol a bit (see here:
http://jamiegeek.myevblog.com/2014/11/19/my-my-ford-mobile/ )
When you press update it appears that it goes through an extra step. Basically pressing update sends a command to the server requesting the update. The MFM app (or website) then repeats calls to check on the status every few seconds or so. The status that comes back starts out with "QUEUED" then changes to "INPROGRESS" and finally "COMPLETED".
The interesting thing is this "QUEUED" status? Perhaps the backend server has a limited number of connections to the car and/or resources and it must queue up the requests to be sent out. (This doesn't really make sense to me given the wide open nature of the the internet: the server should be able to connect to all ~2800 or so FFE's simultaneously and not even bat an eye. Even if you include all the Energi vehicles its still a drop in the bucket in terms of internet connections.)