For almost three days I couldn't get my Angular application to do what it should with onsen.io. ng-repeat were commented out in the DOM tree, ng-click did not respond. Now I finally noticed and became aware of the problem. The ng-controller must not be used on a <ons-template> </ons-template>, but may only be set as an attribute on the <ons-page> </ons-page> at the earliest. I hope with this observation I can prevent others from having such a serious headache.