I tested today building from a mac and everything worked as expected on an iPhone 7. So seems like the problem is with using remote compilation from a windows machine.
Using the mac to watch console live as running the app built from windows I was also able to see an error that hadn’t been showing in the logs. I didn’t save the full output unfortunately but the error occurred after some google-vr initialisation steps and was
NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '*** -[NSURL initFileURLWithPath:]: nil string parameter
.
Another separate issue is that the build didn’t work on an iPhone XR, would crash immediatley after splash. Read somewhere else that it might be because google plugin/sdk doesn’t support the new models.