You sell support and maintenance contracts. That's how busybox and the kernel get maintained. End user software gets written by the users themselves, business

You sell support and maintenance contracts. That's how busybox and the kernel get maintained. End user software gets written by the users themselves, business software is written by consultants. Most of the users are willing to pay not to use closed software. Also the distribution channels aren't anything like app stores. They're usually a repo maintained by the community and you work with them to package your software ex: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports If you want to push corporate garbage like most iOS apps at people just build web pages.