ionic freezes when wifi off

I am building an ionic (phone gap build) app freezes with a white screen if wifi is off on iPhone 4s... at first i thought it was my code... then i ripped everything out and just used the skeleton code from creator (https://creator.ionic.io/) that has no angular or plugins... same thing ... it freezes but works fine when i turn on wifi... any help would be greatly appreciated

in fact it won't even run the code below which does have even script tags unless wifi is on

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=no, width=device-width">
    <title></title>


    <!-- Only required for Tab projects w/ pages in multiple tabs 
    <script src="lib/ionicuirouter/ionicUIRouter.js"></script>
    -->

  </head>
  <body ng-app="app" animation="slide-left-right-ios7">
 hekllo
  </body>
</html>