In any Cordova/Ionic project you define your index page in config.xml like this:

<content src="index.html" />

When the app is started - Cordova loads that page as an entry point. So, this is the only file you can not remove/move/rename in your project. But you can change it's content in any way you want, that's not forbidden.

Let's say you released new app and it loads index.html when launched. Then, you rename it to main.html in chcp.manifest. Plugin will load new manifest from the server, detect, that index.html was removed and delete it. And on the next app launch Cordova will try to load index page, that is defined in config.xml, but not gonna find it, and user will see an error page.

If you want to rename your index page - you need to rename it in config.xml, which means - release new version of the app on the stores. But again, you can change the content of the index page at any time.

cordova-plugin-nativestorage gives you access to native storage. In the case of iOS it's NSUserDefault class, which is, basically, a dictionary, where you can store simple preferences in key-value manner.

Hot code push plugin stores some inner stuff in it, that is needed for updates to work properly.

With cordova-plugin-nativestorage you can call NativeStorage.clear() which will remove all preferences from the native storage (a.k.a NSUserDefaults). As a result, on the next launch user will see a bundled www folder content instead of the loaded one. Plugin will re-download latest release and everything will be back to normal, but still: any time you call NativeStorage.clear() - app will be reset to initial state.