This is scary - a prolific programmer acquires nearly 30,000 downloads and can't even create a profit based on the price of his advertising. What hope is there for newcomers other than to focus more on marketing than on the product itself?
Not all downloads are equal. There are far too many iOS games to make a profit. Had he spent the same amount of time/effort/budget making a productivity tool that catered to a niche market, he could have easily made a net profit.
Or because the set of people who want to mount an SMB share on iOS to get to their music... ah, while "consists primarily of you" is overly snarky, I think it's safe to say that it's probably vanishingly small.
There are all sorts of annoyances about the iOS ecosystem and a good chunk of them are driven by Apple's policies, but the notion that Apple cripples their system with the explicit intent of making it difficult to compete with them is hard to make a strong case for. Apple has their own direct competitor to Pandora, but Pandora is still in the app store. As is Spotify, and SoundCloud, and Beats (which was there before they were an Apple product), and iHeartRadio, and and and. Oh, you say you meant non-streaming players? A lot of people love Ecoute, but there's also Lagu and TuneShell and Listen and I'm sure others I don't know of, which have all sorts of tricks up their sleeve.
tl;dr: kneejerking about Apple is easy and fun! But there's enough actual things to kvetch about without "Apple hates their users, man" conspiracy stuff.
Any one of those games could have (and may yet) reached a critical mass that would lead to profitability, but the market is almost completely unpredictable.
Threes was well-designed, simple, and easy to learn, but the moment it hit the market there were a thousand clones (or more like 2048 clones, amirite?).
Flappy Bird was a weekend project with "borrowed" artwork and by all rights none of us should even know what it is.
There is next to no hope for anyone that doesn't have a massive enough advertising budget to convince people that "hey, all your friends are going to be playing this game, you don't want to miss out." Anything beyond that is blind luck or a truly brilliant/original idea.
I think the truth is that if you're making a free game, you have to put an incredible amount of consideration into replay value and how to keep people playing for long periods (and then how to extract money from them :/ ).
Otherwise you make a paid game and hope an Apple-featuring makes you enough.
I wonder what would happen if app games were run like desktop MMORPGs, where there is a monthly fee. That fee could even be paid via a site, also freeing the app of Apple's cut.
How man SaaS companies have monthly fees with free apps? Then, after you login, the features that you have paid for are available. I can think of plenty.
