Hello Forum Users,
Recently there have been issues reported around AJAX not working with Cordova CLI 4.1.2. While the default build settings may not be adequate for particular app's requirement and the current Build Settings UI might be little confusing, the good news is that it is not a bug. We are looking into making some minor modification to make the UI easy to understand, but with current UI we can set it up per the app requirements to make AJAX calls and launch external applications like phone, sms, mail etc. from within the app.
Please visit this article to have better understanding of Cordova security model and how you can set up the build settings in Intel XDK for your specific use case.
If you have further questions please post on this thread.
Swati