UITableView bouncing back to the top of a section when calling reloadRowsAtIndexPaths

Ah Ha! I found the problem and am going to answer my own question for the poor soul who runs into this issue in the future.

All of my cells have variable height so I was using the new iOS7 method in UITableViewDelegate thinking it might speed up render time (not that I really needed it):

- (CGFloat)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView estimatedHeightForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath;

Anyway, implementing this method has the evil side effect of causing the table to bounce to the top of the section when calling:

[self.tableView reloadRowsAtIndexPaths:@[indexPath] withRowAnimation:UITableViewRowAnimationNone];

To solve the bounce problem I just removed the override of that estimatedHeightForRowAtIndexPath method and now everything works as it should. Happy at last.

This did the trick for me.

UIView.setAnimationsEnabled(false)
tableView.reloadRows(at: [...], with: .none)
UIView.setAnimationsEnabled(true)

You should be able to do what you are trying to do by changing the cell contents directly. For example, if you are using the base UITableViewCell class and the data in your model is a NSString which you show in the table view cell, you can do the following (after you change your data model) instead of calling reloadRowsAtIndexPaths:

UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:indexPath];
UILabel *label = [cell textLabel];
label.text = @"New Value";

If you are using a custom subclass of UITableViewCell, it's roughly the same except for accessing the views of the cell will need to be done through the contentView property.