In all of my work on various Cordova projects, I've only rarely needed to make use of the various events supported by the platform. Last night I needed to add some code to handle the back button. The docs clearly tell you to register your handler after deviceReady has fired:

To override the default back-button behavior, register an event listener for the backbutton event, typically by calling document.addEventListener once you receive the deviceready event.

But obviously I know better. I mean - it's an event, right? So it shouldn't matter when we add the listener. Sure, if the user hits the back button before deviceReady fires, I assume my handler won't run, but it should be safe to register it whenever, right?

Nope.

After bringing this up in the Slack channel, @devgeeks pointed out this little snippet from the Cordova JavaScript library:

/**
 * Intercept calls to addEventListener + removeEventListener and handle deviceready,
 * resume, and pause events.
 */
var m_document_addEventListener = document.addEventListener;
var m_document_removeEventListener = document.removeEventListener;
var m_window_addEventListener = window.addEventListener;
var m_window_removeEventListener = window.removeEventListener;

Essentially, Cordova modifies the default event listener in your web view so it can actually handle some of those special events. So, I guess the point of this post is - yes - it really does matter where you add your event handlers in regards to the events Cordova gives you access to!