This is scary - a prolific programmer acquires nearly 30,000 downloads and can't even create a profit based on the price of his advertising. What hope is there for newcomers other than to focus more on marketing than on the product itself?
Exactly why do I need a zillion apps to mount an SMB share on iOS and do something with <insert specific file type>?
Answer: so iOS doesn't grow a decent music program to compete with iTunes. Apple won't approve things that might compete with their own cash cows.
There are all sorts of annoyances about the iOS ecosystem and a good chunk of them are driven by Apple's policies, but the notion that Apple cripples their system with the explicit intent of making it difficult to compete with them is hard to make a strong case for. Apple has their own direct competitor to Pandora, but Pandora is still in the app store. As is Spotify, and SoundCloud, and Beats (which was there before they were an Apple product), and iHeartRadio, and and and. Oh, you say you meant non-streaming players? A lot of people love Ecoute, but there's also Lagu and TuneShell and Listen and I'm sure others I don't know of, which have all sorts of tricks up their sleeve.
tl;dr: kneejerking about Apple is easy and fun! But there's enough actual things to kvetch about without "Apple hates their users, man" conspiracy stuff.
Welcome to the software business.
Threes was well-designed, simple, and easy to learn, but the moment it hit the market there were a thousand clones (or more like 2048 clones, amirite?).
Flappy Bird was a weekend project with "borrowed" artwork and by all rights none of us should even know what it is.
There is next to no hope for anyone that doesn't have a massive enough advertising budget to convince people that "hey, all your friends are going to be playing this game, you don't want to miss out." Anything beyond that is blind luck or a truly brilliant/original idea.
Otherwise you make a paid game and hope an Apple-featuring makes you enough.