I have same issue on Android and iOS
Ionic version : 1.2.0-nightly-1823

"By default, Ionic 1.2 will use native scrolling on all platforms."

ion-refresher is based on jsScrolling. If you want ion-refresher you should enable jsScrolling. You can do it by adding
$ionicConfigProvider.scrolling.jsScrolling(true);
in your app config. Ref: http://ionicframework.com/docs/api/provider/$ionicConfigProvider/

@KBalaguru Good to know! Thank you. Sadly all examples refers to "nightly" build and should be fixed then.

thank you

@evgd @ronygb you can also do it easily by view (if you need ion-refresher)

<ion-content overflow-scroll="false">
</ion-content>

Thanks, fixed, will be in 1.2.1 when we publish this week