Ionic emulate ios only works with --livereload

I have a simple ionic app that I'm building and when I test with ionic serve --lab, everything looks great, however, when I try to emulate on the simulators with ionic emulate ios or ionic emulate android, the app doesn't load (seems like all the JS isn't coming through). I am able to attach the debugger and there aren't any console errors.

But, when I do try and run the app with ionic emulate ios --livereload everything seems to work fine.

I tried another sample app from scratch to rule out my machine env and it worked fine.

Any ideas on how I can get the emulate to work without --livereload?