That does not make it a lottery. It makes it a business.
The business of making and selling apps is not very different than the business of making and selling shoes, clothes, radios, or hardly anything else you can name. Standard business practices apply.
If you make one app and throw it into the marketplace hoping to get rich, then yes you are treating your business like a lottery and your business will probably fail. If, however, you understand that 9 out of 10 apps lose money, you should either make sure that you have done your homework on the niche you are targeting so that you can ensure your app is as good or better than everything else in that niche, or you'd better market the heck out of your app via every medium you can afford to do so on.
Alternatively you could do what early-stage Venture Capitalists do and spread your risk with the knowledge that most of your investments will never turn a profit, but with the hope that one or more of them will be so successful that they more than make up for the failures.
Again, the app economy is not a lottery. It's a business.
The App Store is a lottery, but only if you treat it like one.
It's a lottery if you just throw an un-polished app into the mess and hope Apple picks it out of the bunch like a BINGO ball for their "Featured" categories.
That's how a lot of people go about it. Submit and hope. Submit and hope. Submit and hope.
Regular updates, improvements, gorilla marketing, polish, press, promotion, etc, are all required to make your app a success, especially if you are a small business that doesn't have a huge marketing budget.
I went through this with my Android games whose free versions have been downloaded millions of times now, and I'm doing it all over again with my 2D platform game Scorched Monster on iPhone.
Sometimes you have to get down and dirty to make it work. Day in and day out I'm marketing in some way, by tweeting, submitting the app for reviews, making videos, posting in forums, doing blog interviews, whatever I can think of... I'm working for it, and I plan to make it a success.
Right. If you build a game app, name it "Words Play" and your marketing strategy is to hope that people find it, you're playing the lottery - and losing.
I have two apps and a third about to launch. One has kind of flopped so far - too wide a niche and it hasn't gotten on any external review sites yet. But the other floats between 500-1000th place in revenue in its category - one of the smaller categories. That's on track to bring in roughly $10,000 a year. Not bad for a first app that would take me a week or two to build now. That's not winning a lottery, but it's a business - a small business.
If you want to run a small business - on the web or in the app store, you need to target a narrow niche. It has to be narrow enough that there's not much well-established competition. It has to be wide enough that there's a profitable market. Then it has to be a market that's willing to spend money. It's not easy to identify those niches, but if you don't even try, you end up throwing out apps and hoping something happens. A class like Ed Dale's Challenge (free) is a big help in identifying niches and testing those markets: http://www.challenge.co/
The business of making and selling apps is not very different than the business of making and selling shoes, clothes, radios, or hardly anything else you can name. Standard business practices apply.
If you make one app and throw it into the marketplace hoping to get rich, then yes you are treating your business like a lottery and your business will probably fail. If, however, you understand that 9 out of 10 apps lose money, you should either make sure that you have done your homework on the niche you are targeting so that you can ensure your app is as good or better than everything else in that niche, or you'd better market the heck out of your app via every medium you can afford to do so on.
Alternatively you could do what early-stage Venture Capitalists do and spread your risk with the knowledge that most of your investments will never turn a profit, but with the hope that one or more of them will be so successful that they more than make up for the failures.
Again, the app economy is not a lottery. It's a business.