A small correction, I said “The mtl and jpg texture are in the package contents.” , not so, the texture wasn’t included.
But manually adding it doesn’t solve the problem.
In reference to the log report,
/Users/paulbourke/Desktop/minimum/Test.app/Contents/Frameworks/VuoRunner.framework/Versions/2/Modules/liboai.dylib
does exist.
Further to looking for a work around … I exported a USDC and GLB from Blender, both work in the Vuo live environment, both fail when built as an app. With the same weird error message as for OBJ.