Where you able to produce a binary directly from the Rust build tools that you could submit to the app/play store?
Not quite, but I tried to get as close to that as was reasonably possible. Alas, things ended up a little convoluted.
For iOS, I have an empty Xcode project with a build script that copies my cargo produced executable into the .app that Xcode generates (before Xcode signs it). The build script also uses lipo to merge the executables for each architecture I’m targeting (e.g. armv7 and aarch64 for non-simulator devices) into a single, universal binary.
On top of that, there are various iOS-y things that need to happen before my application’s main method is called. SDL2 provides the Objective-C code that does all of that. In a C or C++ game, SDL2 renames main to SDL_main, and then inserts its own main which does all of the AppDelegate and LaunchImage and whatever other iOS shenanigans, and then eventually calls SDL_main (all of which happens behind the scenes if you’re just using C or C++).