To be more specific, I've had exactly one 'hit' iOS app. It sold 60,000 copies in late 2008. But I've made my living since early 2010 on iOS (and rails) software consulting and development for other people and through http://www.cocoacontrols.com.
Fully knowing that, at the end of the day, I can't feel proud of that ... unless I also increase the success rate of those miners.
So the moral of this is - don't just sell those picks and axes, but improve and progress the process of finding gold.
You can sell your services to somebody who has better odds of success than you would alone because of finance or other skills experience they have etc.
As I have mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there are a lot of perfectly valid reasons to hire a mobile developer other than "I want to be an appstore millionaire".
Thinking about it only in this way might suggest an over-exposure to HN-think.
I think that might be a sign that this gold rush it's on its last legs. Too many devs got tired of trying, so the question now is how long until the vast infrastructure of app-dev startups starts to crumble due to the old offer>demand imbalance.
Pickaxes sure got a lot cheaper when nobody was looking for gold anymore...
Agreed that the real cash here is in contracting. Use appstore apps as exemplars of your work, make your actual $ consulting.
Even some fairly small companies now want their own 'app' in order to seem hip and modern. This could be anything from a spammy push notification thing to a crappy game that has been rebranded.
The purpose of these apps is not to have millions of downloads, but to have enough customers put it on their phones so that it helps them sell X more of Y where X is some number higher than what it cost to produce the app.
(I can only hope I encounter remotely as much success as they once I launch! :) )