The romantic narrative of the solo developer who builds an app in nights and weekends, publishes it to the App Store, and generates meaningful income from passive sales is not entirely false. It is sufficiently true in enough specific cases to sustain the mythology and sufficiently rare to make the mythology dangerous as a planning assumption.

The structural conditions that made the App Store a viable path to meaningful passive income for individual developers in 2010 to 2015 have changed. The App Store had fewer apps. Discovery was less competitive. Users were more willing to pay upfront for apps they had not tried. The apps that met a basic need in a well-executed way could find their audience without significant marketing investment.

App Store Optimization was, in its early form, a relatively straightforward keyword game. Include the right terms in your app title and description, achieve a certain volume of downloads and ratings, and the app store algorithm would surface your app to relevant searches. The practitioners who figured this out first made significant money. The techniques spread, the competition intensified, and the algorithm changed — as algorithms always do when they are being gamed at scale.

Apple’s App Store commission structure has been the subject of regulatory scrutiny, antitrust litigation, developer revolt, and congressional testimony for five years. The outcome of all this attention is a commission structure that has changed at the margins while remaining fundamentally intact at its core. The 30 percent standard rate — reduced to 15 percent for developers earning under a million dollars annually and for certain subscription renewals — continues to apply to the overwhelming majority of App Store revenue.