It's very likely that the AppStore market follows a power-law (or Zipf or Pareto) distribution of some sort. That is, the top 10 take 10% of the revenues, the

It's very likely that the AppStore market follows a power-law (or Zipf or Pareto) distribution of some sort. That is, the top 10 take 10% of the revenues, the next 100 take 10%, the next 1000 take 10%, etc. What the scaling exponent and constants are is anyone's guess without detailed sales data. This is similar to how most unregulated markets work. Consider restaurants. There are a handful of massive international chains, a small number of medium size chains and a huge number of mom & pop eateries, some of which do quite well (relatively speaking) and some of which just fail. Final analysis: you won't get rich on apps unless you're either A) very lucky or B) efficiently create quality apps at good prices with good marketing. I'd hope that most people on HN would opt for B :-).