Three years ago my friend published his first app in the App Store. He taught himself Objetive-C and had never programmed a day in his life before. He first app made a few bucks a day so you know what he did? He build another app. And another. And another. You know what he is doing today? House hunting in San Francisco and taking frequent vacations to Hawaii. By the way he did this working four days a week. So the problem is not really the App store it's that peoples initial exception don't intersect with their willingness to put in the time needed to build a business.

I think a lot of us are curious if this is still possible (or whether it is only true if you built apps 3 years ago) and would like to hear from anyone with knowledge as to whether this is still possible simply by playing the numbers game with a 1-man shop.

For example, "met" a guy on Reddit who claimed to have built a bootload of Google Gadgets and made 1/2 mil in the process. I've been in the same market during that same time-frame, so I'm generally aware of what is feasible... and I believe I can vouch for the fact that this may still be possible, but probably 150x harder now.

Once he got to 100-250k installs things started to take off but that did not happen until two years in so this success is not that long ago. He also started to build more polished apps at that time and stopped consulting to pay the bills and worked on his own stuff "full time."

Kudos to your friend but to me this seems to be an outlier rather than an indication of people not being willing to put the time in to build a business. The point about search being broken is surely that while success is always a big part luck, not having proper search makes discoverability of high quality products harder and so increases the luck factor?

It seems to me, after creating several apps of my own, that the App Store is meant to reward outliers, not make sure everyone gets in front of people.

We've released a few apps and found that the most successful were the ones which didn't fit any basic mold. At the same time, the more apps we make, the better we do.

andymoe's friend is the kind of story that Apple wants to have seen and they curate and control the medium to make it easier for people like that to succeed. I'm not saying they do the best job of it - crap copycat apps are in there too - but they have made a great medium for the persistent, innovative and determined developer to succeed.

Of course, when you make a medium that rewards persistence, unfortunately copycats can also succeed because they can be persisten too. Take the good with the bad.

I see what you mean and don't actually think it's a bad thing for it to be targeted at rewarding outliers - really good apps are probably by definition outliers.

But my concern about the poor search functionality is that it rewards the wrong outliers. E.g. people who are persistent and lucky/ early to the game rather than persistent and release great apps.

My very anecdotal example of this is the travel planner apps people use in London. Most people on ios I know use apps which are shockingly inaccurate with ux that leaves a lot to be desired.

They continue to use them because short of "download whatever has been downloaded a lot by other people" there's no reasonable way to find new higher quality ones.

I think there's a lot of factors at work, the search is terrible but there's plenty of app recommendation services now, one of the big issues seems to be that there's now a mindset of "£1.79? That's really pricy" and they'll move on pretty quickly. That's a big barrier and it's not going away anytime soon really, but alternatives like IAP are now getting push back and mobile advertising doesn't seem to be a solid cash stream yet.

There's partly also a trust issue. If I go to buy an app on the App Store, there's a very good chance that the $5 is complete rubbish, is buggy or lied in it's description. There's no way of getting a trial, and getting your money back is harder than pulling teeth.

It's extraordinarily easy to get burned.

Not only on iOS. The "App Store" model as it is implemented today on most platforms is bloated and corrupted, it's just a mess. It _could_ be a tad better on Android since Google allows 3rd party app stores (could open up for specialization etc, like Steam for Android or similar) but in reality you still must be on Google Play (which is a hell hole) to succeed.

That's just a fun term, safe to say it was a fair bit more than pennies for a pizza. $200 ruby motion was definitely paid off from this app.

Right, the author stated that he had a couple of thousand sales. The app is offered for £0.79. That means he earned at least £1100 ($1650). Not bad given that the app has been in the App Store for two weeks.