Path must be a string. Received undefined

It has been a couple months since I last used Intel XDK and a lot has changed since. I just tried to compile a demo HTML5 + Cordova Android app which was exported using Intel XDK version 3987 and got the following error while trying to add android platform to the app using cordova command line. To see how compiling is done, check this blog post.

Discovered plugin “cordova-plugin-whitelist” in config.xml. Adding it to the project
Installing “cordova-plugin-whitelist” for android

This plugin is only applicable for versions of cordova-android greater than 4.0. If you have a previous platform version, you do *not* need this plugin since the whitelist will be built in.

Saved plugin info for “cordova-plugin-whitelist” to config.xml
Error: Path must be a string. Received undefined

After this error you wont be able to compile the APK. Some research on google got me to this thread which eventually worked.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46730465/can-not-add-cordova-platform-on-cordova-7-1-0-path-must-be-a-string

To fix this issue, open config.xml in root folder of exported app and remove the following section

<config-file platform="android" parent="/manifest/application" mode="merge"> 
<activity android:launchMode="singleTop" />
</config-file>