Android release builds suddenly stopped working (ionic 1.1.0)

Hi, I've been making successful test releases of my app for the past few months. Last week, i updated ionic, applied the IOS9 patches per their blog posts and everything works fine for iOS (debug and release mode) as well as Android (debug mode). However, when I upload the APK to the play store, and I download it (or I do adb -r myreleasefiles), the APK in release mode does not work at all - the CSS does not load up at all so I can't use the app (works fine in debug mode)

and when I inspect via chrome, it should not show up either (can you not connect release mode app files to Chrome debug)

I don't quite know what suddenly went wrong. Can someone help?

ionic info:

Your system information:

Cordova CLI: 5.3.1
Gulp version:  CLI version 3.9.0
Gulp local:   Local version 3.9.0
Ionic Version: 1.1.0
Ionic CLI Version: 1.6.4
Ionic App Lib Version: 0.3.8
ios-deploy version: Not installed
ios-sim version: Not installed
OS: Mac OS X Yosemite
Node Version: v0.12.4
Xcode version: Xcode 7.0 Build version 7A220

My android release build script

#!/bin/bash

echo "Building Release mode for android..."
ionic build android --release

rm -f release_files/*
cp platforms/android/build/outputs/apk/android-x86-release-unsigned.apk release_files/
cp platforms/android/build/outputs/apk/android-armv7-release-unsigned.apk release_files/
echo "Copied files to release_files"


read -p "Press any key to jarsign... " -n1 -s
cd release_files/
jarsigner -verbose -sigalg SHA1withRSA -digestalg SHA1 -keystore ../platforms/android/zmNinja.keystore android-armv7-release-unsigned.apk zmNinja
jarsigner -verbose -sigalg SHA1withRSA -digestalg SHA1 -keystore ../platforms/android/zmNinja.keystore android-x86-release-unsigned.apk zmNinja

read -p "Press any key to zipalign... " -n1 -s

~/Library/Android/sdk/build-tools/22.0.1/zipalign -v 4 android-x86-release-unsigned.apk zmNinja-x86.apk
~/Library/Android/sdk/build-tools/22.0.1/zipalign -v 4 android-armv7-release-unsigned.apk zmNinja-arm.apk
rm -f android-x86-release-unsigned.apk android-armv7-release-unsigned.apk

cd ..

Here is the android build release logs:

Interestingly, neither ionic build android nor ionic build --release list the build apk files at the end (if you see the gist above at the very end, it does not list the built output files like it used to before)

but it does build them and in debug more it works perfectly. This is what gets built in release mode but ionic build does not print them at the end like old build processes did

./platforms/android/build/outputs/apk/android-armv7-release-unsigned.apk
./platforms/android/build/outputs/apk/android-x86-release-unsigned.apk