Goal

Get your app’s home screen showing the right sections, in the order you meant. This article covers the three complaints we hear most:

• Sections appear in a different order than the one you set in the builder.
• One or more sections are missing — they were added in the builder but never show in the app.
• A section is stuck at the top no matter where you drag it, or appears duplicated.

Behind the scenes, your home screen comes from the Home Screen Content builder (the home_screen_stack setting) — each row you add there becomes one section in the app, rendered top to bottom in the order the rows are saved.

Prerequisites

• Admin access to Mobile App Manager and the App Setup / Home Screen settings where the Home Screen Content builder lives.
• A test device or the preview build, so you can confirm changes after each save.
• Know which role you are editing. The home screen stack is stored per role — the builder edits one role at a time (the default is the “all users” role). If your app shows different home screens to different user types, you may be looking at the wrong role’s stack.

Before you start: how the stack is built

Once you see how MAM assembles the stack, most of these issues explain themselves. Here’s what happens when the app asks for its data:

• A navigation header goes in first, automatically — this isn’t something you control in the builder.
• Your builder sections are added in saved order, one after another.
• A small set of section types are force-pinned to the top of the stack, no matter where you put them (see below).

That’s why the order you see on the device won’t always match the builder exactly, top to bottom — steps 1 and 3 are shifting things around, and that’s expected behavior, not a bug.

Steps

1. Confirm you are editing the correct role

Start here, because it’s easy to overlook: the stack you’re editing belongs to one role, and one role only. Open the Home Screen Content builder and check the role selector. If the wrong home screen is showing in the app:

• Switch to the role the affected users actually have and check that stack.
• If you only ever use one home screen, confirm you are on the default (“all users”) role and that role-specific stacks are not overriding it.

2. Re-check the saved order, then save again

This is the most common culprit, and the fix is almost too simple: the app only renders sections in the order they are saved, not the order you last saw them arranged on screen. A drag that never got saved never takes effect.

• Drag the sections into the intended order using the sort arrows.
• Save the settings page. Re-ordering in the browser does nothing until you save.
• Refresh the app data (pull-to-refresh, or relaunch) and re-check.

Still looks wrong after saving? Move on to the next step — you’re probably running into a pinned section.

3. Account for sections that are pinned to the top

A handful of section types always move themselves to the top of the home screen, no matter where you drag them in the builder. Right now, that list includes:

• Category Filter Bar (filter_bar)
• Listing Search (listing_search)
• Geofilters (geo_filters)
• Tag Cloud (tag_cloud)

If one of these keeps drifting back to the top no matter what you do, that’s by design, not a glitch — these controls are meant to stay within reach above the scrolling content. There’s nothing to fix here; just build the rest of your layout around them.

One wrinkle worth knowing: the Geofilters section has its own Pin to Top toggle inside it. Since Geofilters is already one of the always-pinned types listed above, that toggle doesn’t actually change anything — the geofilters control stays pinned to the top either way.

4. Find sections that silently dropped out

Sometimes a section is sitting right there in the builder, saved and all, but it never shows up on the device. A few things usually explain that:

• Image section with no image selected. An Image section needs a valid uploaded image to render at all. If you added the section but never picked one — or the image was later deleted from the Media Library — it gets skipped entirely. Re-open the Image section and choose an image.
• A section with no type. If a section row somehow lost track of its type — a half-finished add, say, or settings copied over from another site — it gets skipped too. Delete the empty section and re-add it from the Add Section dropdown.
• A section type your current app build does not support. Some section types come from add-on plugins or newer app builds, so if the section needs a feature your app doesn’t include yet, it simply won’t appear. Confirm the relevant plugin is active and that your app build is current.

To add the section back cleanly, choose it from the Add Section dropdown, click Add, fill in its fields, drag it into place, and save.

5. Rule out duplicates and the “Geofilters showing twice” case

If a section shows up twice, look for two rows of the same type in the builder — it’s an easy click to make twice on Add. Delete the extra row with the trash-can icon and save.

One case deserves a special call-out. Add a Geofilters section to the stack, and the app automatically hides the standalone geofilters bar that would otherwise appear elsewhere — that’s intentional, so you don’t end up with geofilters in two places at once. So if your standalone geofilters bar vanished, this is almost certainly why: a Geofilters section now exists in the stack. Remove the stack section if you’d rather have the standalone bar back.

6. Check the home screen’s default category

Sections all correct, but the home screen still opens to the wrong content (wrong category of listings)? That’s a different setting altogether: Home Screen Default Category (initial_home_section). It controls which category the home screen lands on at launch, not the order of the sections. Set it to whatever category you want users to see first.

7. Confirm the app actually pulled fresh data

A settings change only reaches the device once the app refreshes its payload — the bundle of data your app downloads from your site. After every save:

• Pull-to-refresh on the home screen, or fully relaunch the app.
• If you are reviewing a build, make sure it is pointed at the same environment you just edited.

More often than not, a “my change didn’t take” report turns out to be a stale payload rather than a real ordering bug.

Still wrong?

Still out of order or missing after saving and refreshing, and it’s not one of the pinned types and not an empty/imageless section? Capture:

• The role you are editing.
• The section type affected and its position in the builder.
• A screenshot of the builder and a screenshot of the app home screen.

Hand that over to your developer or to MAM support. The order and pinning rules live in the home-screen stack builder code, and a developer can confirm whether a custom pin-to-top rule or a section handler is involved.

Related

• Home Screen Content (home_screen_stack) — the builder that defines your sections and their order.
• Home Screen Default Category (initial_home_section) — which category the home screen opens to.
• Section reference articles for the individual section types (Image, Geofilters, Category Filter Bar, Tag Cloud, and others) — for what each section needs in order to render.

What’s next

Once the order is correct, it’s worth reviewing whether any sections should differ by role. The stack is stored per role, so you can give signed-in users, members, or staff a different home-screen layout than anonymous visitors get.