No scripts found for hook "after_run". Cordova, Ionic, Android

I'm building an Android application using Cordova, Ionic and Angular. At some point the application has stopped running on the device. When I run:

ionic run android --verbose

I get the splash screen on my tablet, but in the mac console I get:

after LAUNCH SUCCESS

No scripts found for hook "after_run".

and then on the device screen I get the dreaded Application Error: The connection to the server was unsuccessful (file:///android_asset/www/index.html)

followed by the big crash..

I tried looking for the "after_run" string in the code, but I only find it in the documentation, so I have no idea what could be causing this.

any help is appreciated.