Samsung Galaxy Note II running Android 4.4.2, tried this with the nightly build and with 1.2.2 from the Play store.
On some screens, scrolling down makes the menu items disappear. Also, opening RetroArch after the very first time makes the controller overlay appear and no menu items are shown beneath.
Screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/jRfvB
Edit: screenshots are out of order, one shows the controller overlay and blank menu, the other 4 are menus before and after scrolling.
I have the same issue, it appers is a known bug dunno why they have not fix it, you can just change the settings to have the overlay always on and use it to navigate the menu.
Yeah, it’s a weird device-specific issue. We can’t figure out what’s going on and we can’t reproduce it on our own devices, though we readily admit that it’s a real thing.
Is there some way I can help to get the issue fixed without getting into the programming myself? Perhaps installing a debug version of some sort and posting logs?
There’s no debug version, you just have to turn on logging verbosity and then get a logcat (I find it easiest to debug through a PC connection via adb). If you can find an error or something that occurs reproducibly with the error, that might get us on the right track.
changing the menu_driver to “rgui” also works
Okay, new information for this problem. I decided to try the 10-27 nightly and the menu is different now. The top and bottom bars are blue with white text and the middle menu part is white background with black text. Not sure if that’s intentional or just a new bug for some Android devices. But – now when I scroll down the menu items don’t disappear! But what does happen is that the middle area changes from white background / black text to black background / grey text. Were there changes to the main GUI code in the past few days? Must have been, whatever was changed is close to fixing this. Thankfully since nothing disappears now it’s all good on Android! 
That’s good. Kivutar has been doing some work on trying to convert GLUI to “material design” look, so something involved in that may be responsible. He said there was also a problem with drawing order that may have been related.