Concerning Android: Android doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t, at least not when it’s about earning some cash. Android is cluttered version wise, so it costs a lot of time to develop and for testing. The devices are inconsistent in performance and screen sizes, which takes additional time to develop for. Then there’s the user base of Android: People who want to buy cheap phones because they can’t (or don’t want to) cash out 500 bucks for a smartphone with an Apple on the back. Sure, there’s a bunch of geeks and nerds who buy Android to make a point and because they really think it’s actually better, but don’t rely on them to make a buck from your game. (Geek Android users are like the Linux fans of the last two decades: They are there, keep it alive, but no one makes a serious buck on them.)
Then there’s the multitude of different stores, some of them are whole lot worse than the App Store when it comes to dev-friendlieness. Ever tried to sell something through Amazon’s app marketplace? Don’t even try. Basically, you’ll be at Amazon’s mercy. They take the right to change description texts, keywords and prices as they see fit. Apple’s 70% cut and their review procedures look pretty friendly and down-to-earth in comparison to Amazon’s way to do business. And Google’s marketplace is nothing more than an unorganized pile of crap, your game will be lost in there even more than it ever did in the App Store.
And then there’s the final nail in Android’s coffin: It’s way too easy to install stolen apps. I’ve heard from a considerable amount of devs that knew from analytics that thousands of people play their games, only that they sold just a few hundred copies in total.

The truth is, Apple’s App Store works. It just does. It’s a perfectly fine market place to sell your software at. But col000r said it himself: It was a whole lot easier three years ago, because there wasn’t a lot of competition going on.
The only thing that Apple does wrong is that they approve every piece of shit that gets submitted to them, no matter how good it is. But then again: What if they didn’t? I can almost hear the angry mob crying “censorship” and “unfair policy”. Apple simply has no choice.

One could argue that the mistake was to endorse a price as low as 99 cents. People now think it’s possible to produce content for that kind of money, but it isn’t. And for everyone who thinks its easy for EA and the like to produce content for a buck a shot and forcefully push to a black bottom line by throwing shitloads of money into advertising: They have to fight just as hard as we indy devs do. For every Tetris they have in the store there’s a couple of games that’s not even in the top 50. I know, most of us would be happy beyond believe if we could sustain a sales rank that high for just a few weeks, but EA is not a tiny company. They’re having just as a hard time as we do to survive, only they also need to pay wages for a huge workforce.

In the end, it boils down to having prime content, a prime quality product. It’s actually that easy. I can understand col000r’s disappointment first hand. I have been there, I have done that, I had to learn the very same lessons. But it doesn’t help your bottom line to be angry at others that your game doesn’t sell. It’s everybody’s own fault. It’s simply not reasonable to think you could make a decent income on a product that doesn’t really stand out in a marketplace that is overrun by tens of thousands of cheap fucks who all think they can get rich doing the next Angry Birds.

But to end this on a positive note: I also learned another lesson. If your game doesn’t get bought by a whole lot of people anyway, those who do buy it because they like it. And those are willing to pay for content. If you can’t make a living by sell in quantity, do it with quality. Raise the price to 2.99 or even 4.99 and explain why you did that in the description text. You’ll see pretty soon that your sales won’t slow down by much, but your bottom line will grow by a lot.

And then there’s also other software genres that are not nearly as crowded as the games sector: Utilities, Healthcare and Fitness, Music – there’s a whole bunch of ideas and concepts that haven’t been done yet for the App Store. You don’t need to make games to make money.