we recently wrote a paper that explores the unfavorable situation most developers are facing in app marketplaces. Due to high intra-platform competition and platform owner's power in determining rules of visibility, revenue sharing and ways to monetize, most developers are unlikely to make profit with their apps. This is in contrast what platform owners would like developers to believe by disseminating success stories. All is fine as long as developers understand that success stories are anomaly, not a rule, and perhaps consider ways to counter the platform owner's use of power (more on that in the paper).

Briefly - don't be surprised to see high failure rates among apps (that is a natural result of how app stores are built) and don't buy into fool's gold.

The paper can be freely accessed at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.6170

Br, Joni Salminen & Jose Teixeira Turku School of Economics ps. we appreciate all comments, can be directed here or at: joolsa@utu