point light flickers on iOS but works fine in Android

I have a scene where I have on directional light acting as the sun and a single point light as a child of the main player, so that it always follows the player. The point light is realtime, no shadows. When I export to Android, the illumination looks fine as in the editor, but if instead I export to iOS, the player object being lit by the point light flickers between black and illuminated. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or if this is a bug. I'm suing forward rendering and the Google Cardboard plugin.

I checked the following things at no avail, in all cases Android works fine and iOS flickers:

1. Quality Settings: and in both cases (Android and iOS) I'm at 1 pixel light. I even tried increasing to 4.

2. Camera's clipping planes: I tried setting the near plane to 1 instead of .3 and the far one to a smaller value than the one I'm currently using.

3. GI: enabling and disabling both precomputed and baked GI.

4. Culling Masks: I also setting the light to only work on a dedicated player layer.

The one thing that did make the light stop flicker in iOS was forcing OpenGLES2. It seems it flickers on iOS with both ES3 and Metal. But unfortunately I can't use GL2 because then the Cardboard plugin crashes.

This last thing (that it works on GLES2) is what makes me think maybe it is a bug? Any ideas?

Another thing I've noticed in general is that the iOS build looks much darker / dull in general than Android or the Editor. Thanks!