S130 seems to silently fail

I am trying to port an old bootloader from SDK8 S110 to SDK12.3 S130. I followed the examples in the SDK for how to initialize and start the SoftDevice. Building the example code (for instance the ble template app) works and advertises as expected. However, when I run the same code in my bootloader the execution gets stuck in the weak SVC handler in the startup assembly file. If I add calls to sd_mbr_command and sd_softdevice_vector_table_base_set i get further. From this point every call I make to the SD returns NRF_SUCCESS. I am able to enable ble and register event handlers, create my service with characteristics and configure and start advertisements. However I never see any advertisements at all. If i set the advertisement timeout to 10 seconds I do get the timeout event. 

Is there anything obvious that I am missing here? I especially wonder why I have to run the MBR commands when the examples does not.

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