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Only $190? I made about $1k with a small learning app I put up. The goal was just to recoup the developer fee and it made more than that. I still get $5-$10 from Apple deposited in my account every so often :)

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$190 is probably even high for an "average" app. Plenty of $1 apps languish with sales that round to zero. Either they're no good, or they have too much competition, or they have insufficient marketing so nobody knows they exist, or they got unlucky somehow (bad choice of name, who knows).

Actually rather than being unlucky, I think it would be more correct to say that they failed to get lucky somehow. In the absence of doing something right (promotion, naming, hitting a niche at the right time, having other successful apps by the same developer) or getting lucky (being featured by Apple or a blog, etc.), I expect the natural state of an app is to have sales that round to zero.

With hundreds of thousands of apps in the App Store, it's not much different from building a random website and expecting people to somehow just show up.

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