Great article! I too wrote an iPhone game[1] while in high school (2 years ago during sophomore year) and while I didn't make $35k, the game did get downloaded close to 600,000 times while it was free. It was an extremely valuable experience that I learned a lot from.
It always amazed me how easy the App Store made it to access such a vast market and that a game I built in my free time was being downloaded by people in countries as far away as Kazakhstan.