In terms of video games. I'm personally not a mobile gamer though. Maybe it's quite a bit different from desktop and console.
> There's a subset of users who are hungry for high quality applications and games.
The amount of awful going on in the space of "mobile development" long passed unacceptable to me. The idea that McDonald's is $10.00 or $4.50 if I use their app that crashes, needs my location, sends me random empty notifications and every other minor and major brand's app that wants to slurp up any little bit of data they can and make my notification tray useless. I'm not happy with the "check this box and we'll track everything you do but 'trust us'" cloud-enabling Windows and every app being non-functional without an internet connection and the "functionality provided" often being "license validation" and/or "share this! social network features and data mining"... takes a breath yeah, that got away from me ... but it's just nuts.
[0] The reviews which mix in the mess of one-stars from "a bad release" among the five-star "some of which were clearly paid for" just leave one wanting to take up drinking.
Can you point to someone having this sort of success based on this model in the mobile space?
$5 up front, $5 for each expansion (currently 2) which add a substantial amount of content each.
The devs are active, patching regularly, and planning another content update this year. They just released a free new mode to the game as well.
No ads, no microtransactions just a fun and complete game with lots of replay value - I hope they can sustain it over time