Changing preferences on config.xml has no effect after upgrading Cordova to 3.5.0 in my Ionic app

I tried to remove the splash screen spinning wheel that pervades the center top portion of my app.

I found that through previous questions asked on StackOverflow and Ionic support forums that the animation could be removed by entering the following line into my project's config.xml file.

<preference name="showSplashScreenSpinner" value="false"/>

I updated my project's cordova version by running the following lines in my project directory.

npm install -g cordova
cordova update platform ios

I restarted the ionic server after inputting the preference into config.xml, but the spinning wheel is still there.

I noticed that when I type cordova info into the terminal, it tells me cordova's version is 0.21.6

How can I remove the splash screen spinner?