Where are building an application but the backend of this application normally will run w/o proper certificate (is a thin client for our main software). Sadly every production build are unable to establish connection to said backed. We also tried with a let’s encrypt certificate without any luck.
We are building our app with this ( following are your guide http://ionicframework.com/docs/v1/guide/publishing.html)
ionic cordova build android --prod --release
we also edited our /platforms/android/AndroidManifest.xml and added the debuggable flag
and even edited platforms/android/CordovaLib/src/org/apache/cordova/CordovaWebView.java so the webview can ingnore certificate errors