This is 100% reproducible and appears to be intentional.
The following use case is broken
- user installs app, sees UI u_1
- user is switched to channel c_1, sees UI u_2
- app has bugs in native code - new version with fixes is pushed. u_2 is unchanged.
- user now sees u_1 without any explanation
- user also has no way to go back to the expected u_2. Both check() and load() fail for separate reasons
This appears to be intentional - check the issue that I filed against ionic deploy.