We have an app which has been working to pull JSON data from a webserver using:
$resource(baseUrl + prefix + type).get().$promise.then(function(d) { ... }
we were using Cordova 4 (not sure what version of ionic or angular). We have recently updated to Cordova 6 (and possibly updated ionic and angular as well) - i think i have Angular 1.4.3 at the moment.
Although the code above has been working fine; it now seems to be stripping all the closing HTML tags that are in the json data.