The only way to definitely get items in natural order is to use a "readNode" to get a parent item and all the children will be listed in natural order. This should be clearly documented.

It should also be documented that if you supply no parameters or path - then the QUERY is used, not the READNODE.

It should be documented that when the QUERY is used with no ordering paramaters - than the "nagtural" repositories order will be used. But that this unfortunately often does not reflect the order in the app. There should be some information about JCR indexing etc. See forum posts linked here: https://jira.magnolia-cms.com/browse/MGNLREST-169?focusedCommentId=156550&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#comment-156550

It might be possible to do this on items in the root by requesting the root node - but im not sure.

After a ticket is fixed it may be possible to get items from the "query" but it depends on a bug being fixed and on strange JCR behaviour as mentioned in linked ticket.

See comments on: https://jira.magnolia-cms.com/browse/MGNLREST-169