Mobile app profitability isn't linear, or even close to linear - you're either rolling in the dough or you're not even making ramen money.

Discoverability is a huge problem, if you're not in a featuring, a top-X list, or something of the sort, your profitability is extremely limited. If there's no visibility on the App Store for you, you don't get fewer users, you get almost no users.

$2K sustaining revenue a month isn't impossible, but it's hard.

From this discussion, it sounds like it's potentially very profitable to be a consultant MAKING apps for other companies, but, except for very rare cases, the apps themselves are not profitable.

We may do a follow-up survey to attempt to confirm our assumption that the vast majority of people that make money from apps are doing so by invoicing clients, rather than selling apps in the store(s).

So what's stopping people from making a web app that offers better native app discoverability than the app store?

Those exist, but there are a few key problems:

- Most of them are pretty sketchy marketing schemes, not unlike the "Top Sites" aggregators of yore. There's no user trust, because they are just pay-to-play.

- The friction is still enormous. You're on a website, you find an app you like, you tap on a link. It switches to the App Store App (heh). You wait. You wait some more. You wait for the hybrid-webview-bullshit-thing to kick in and load the detail page. You tap Buy/Install, you authenticate. You wait some more. There's no way to bypass the App Store, sadly.

Android does better in this regard where a user sitting at their home computer can send an app to their phone. This does wonders for your ability to market your app.